"Hic jacet CASPARUS HAUSER Ænigma sui temporis Ignota Nativitas Occulta Mors, 1833." CHAPTER V _The Castle, the Walls and Mediæval Fortifications_ "Aufwärts Ich mit dem Alten ging Nach einer königlichen Veste, Am Fels erbauet auf das Beste; Manch Thurm auf Felsvorsprüngen lag, Darin ein kaiserlich Gemach. Geziert nach meisterlichen Sinnen Die Fenster waren und die Zinnen; Darum ein Graben war gehauen In harten Fels." --HANS SACHS. Nuremberg is set upon a series of small slopes in the midst of an undulating, sandy plain, some 900 feet above the sea. Here and there on every side fringes and patches of the mighty forest which once covered it are still visible; but for the most part the plain is now freckled with picturesque villages, in which stand old turreted châteaux, with gabled fronts and latticed windows, or it is clothed with carefully cultivated crops or veiled from sight by the smoke which rises from the new-grown forest of factory chimneys. The railway sets us down outside the walls of the city. As we walk from the station towards the Frauen Thor, and stand beneath the crown of fortified walls three and a half miles in circumference, and gaze at the old grey towers and picturesque confusion of domes, pinnacles and spires, suddenly it seems as if our dream of a feudal city has been realised. There, before us, is one of the main entrances, still between massive gates and beneath archways flanked by stately towers. Still to reach it we must cross a moat fifty feet deep and a hundred feet wide. True, the swords of old days have been turned into pruning-hooks; the crenelles and embrasures which once bristled and blazed with cannon are now curtained with brambles and wallflowers, and festooned with virginia creepers; the galleries are no longer crowded with archers and cross-bowmen; the moat itself has blossomed into a garden, luxuriant with limes and acacias, elders, planes, chestnuts, poplars, walnut, willow and birch trees, or divided into carefully tilled little garden plots. True it is that outside the moat, beneath the smug grin of substantial modern houses, runs that mark of modernity, the electric tram. But let us for the moment forget these gratifying signs of modern prosperity and, turning to the left ere we enter the Frauen Thor, walk with our eyes on the towers which, with their steep-pitched roofs and myriad shapes and richly coloured tiles, mark the intervals in the red-bricked, stone-cased galleries and mighty bastions, till we come to the first beginnings of Nuremberg--the Castle. There, on the highest eminence of the town, stands that venerable fortress, crowning the red slope of tiles. Roofs piled on roofs, their pinnacles, turrets, points