As you wander round the city tracing the line of the old walls, you are struck by the general air of splendour. Most of the houses are large and of a massive style of architecture, adorned with fanciful gables and bearing the impress of the period when every inhabitant was a merchant, and every merchant was lodged like a king. The houses of the merchant princes, richly carved both inside and out, tell of the wealth and splendour of Nuremberg in her proudest days. But you will also come upon a hundred crooked little streets and narrow alleys, which, though entrancingly picturesque, tell of yet other days and other conditions. They tell of those early mediæval days when the houses were almost all of wood and roofed with straw-thatching or wooden tiles; when the chimneys and bridges alike were built of wood. Only here and there a stone house roofed with brick could then be seen. The streets were narrow and crooked, and even in the fifteenth century mostly unpaved. In wet weather they were filled with unfathomable mud, and even though in the lower part of the town trenches were dug to drain the streets, they remained mere swamps and morasses. In dry weather the dust was even a worse plague than the mud. Pig-styes stood in front of the houses; and the streets were covered with heaps of filth and manure and with rotting corpses of animals, over which the pigs wandered at will. Street police in fact was practically non-existent. Mediævalism is undoubtedly better when survived. As to the original extent of the city walls there are many theories. Most likely they embraced a very small district. According to Mummenhoff the first town wall ran from the west side of the Castle in a southerly direction over the modern Weinmarkt. (To reach it go straight down the Albert Durer Strasse, starting from Durer's house.) Further on the wall struck eastwards (_l_) to the river, either leaving the swampy meadowland near the river free, or, as others hold, coming right down to the river banks. Then, leaving the river again near the Spitalplatz, it stretched northward, apparently from the Malerthor which was then in existence, to the Romer Tower in the Tetzelgasse.[28] This tower was probably not actually part of the wall but a fortified house, such as may be seen in many German and Italian towns, built by the dwellers in it for their own especial protection. A noble family of the name of Romer lived there in early times and gave their name to the house. But popular tradition has forgotten this fact and asserts that the tower dates back from Roman times. From this spot the wall made a distinct bend to the east, ran over the Ægidien hill through the Wolfsgasse, where we may perhaps still recognise in one of the houses an old tower of the wall, and so on to the Fröschturm, or Frog's Tower near the Maxthor of to-day.