But let us leave the river Main and the river Rhine and look up Nuremberg and Munich before we follow our southern course to the Adriatic. An erratic journey this, but have we not found some shells which the other conchologists overlooked? Nuremberg seems to have lost more in population than any German city we know of. Having once numbered 100,000, it now claims only 55,000. It is a curious fact that Nuremberg toys which were so celebrated formerly, have been surpassed in this country, and now American manufactures in this line are taken to Nuremberg and actually sold as German toys. This was told me by a gentleman interested in the trade. But buy a lead-pencil in Nuremberg if you want a good article very cheap—perhaps you can learn to draw or sketch with one, being inspired with the memory of Albert Dürer. Nuremberg is Bavaria’s second largest city, and attracts more foreigners or visitors than Munich, perhaps, yet to the mind of the Bavarian Munich is Bavaria, as to the Frenchman Paris is France, and to the Prussian Berlin is Prussia! No traveler can be contented, however, without some time in Nuremberg, although I dare say many go away disappointed. The old stone houses with their carved gables, the walls and turrets, St. Sebald Church, and the fortress where Gustavus Adolphus with his immense army was besieged by Wallenstein, are things which never grow tedious to the memory. In this fortress now they keep the instruments of torture used in the middle ages to extract secrets from the criminal or the innocent, as it might chance to be. A German in Berlin laughingly told me when I described the rusty torturous things, that they were all of recent manufacture, and were not the genuine articles at all! But new or old, genuine or reproduced, they make one shudder as does Fox’s “Book of Martyrs.” I know of no church in Germany more worthy of study than St. Sebald’s. In it one finds a curious old gold lamp, which swings from the ceiling about half way down one aisle of the church. It is called _die ewige lampe_, because it has been always burning since the twelfth century. It is related of one of Nuremberg’s respectable old citizens that he was returning in the darkness one stormy night to his home, and finally almost despaired of finding his way, when a faint light from the St. Sebald’s Church enabled him to arrive safe at his own door. He gave a fund to the church afterward for the purpose of keeping there a perpetual light. When the Protestants took St. Sebald’s, as they did so many Catholic churches in Germany after the Reformation, the interest money which the old man gave had still to be used in this way according to his will. So _die ewige lampe_ still swings and gives its dim light to the passer-by at night. Our American consul told me a characteristic story of an American girl and her mother, whom he was showing about Nuremberg, as was his social duty, perhaps. They were in St. Sebald’s Church, and