The story of the original plans, which were recovered in the loft of an inn, reads like a fairy tale. Before the Napoleonic wars the plans of the cathedral were kept in the chapter-house. During the French occupation, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were removed for greater safety to a Benedictine monastery. The monastery was broken up and the forgotten and neglected designs came eventually into the possession of a private family, who used the great sheets of parchment for drying beans. Subsequently the son of the house went to Darmstadt for educational purposes. His anxious mother thought the young man’s clothes would be kept clean and dry if his box were lined with the stout parchment sheets which had rendered useful service in the case of the beans. The youth took up his residence in Darmstadt at the Gasthaus zur Traube. Internal evidence shows that, once away from the vigilant maternal eye, the care of his clothes must have suffered. The coverings intended to protect his garments from dust and damp were cast aside with youthful recklessness. The scrolls, still carrying their hidden treasure of the great design of the west end of the cathedral, were thrown away and consigned as litter to the loft of the inn. There they were discovered by a carpenter sufficiently intelligent to appreciate their importance. From his hands they passed into those of a painter, and eventually after a journey via Paris were returned to Cologne. They hang to-day in a chapel of the choir. The stone from which the cathedral is built is quarried in the Drachenfels. Unfortunately it is soft and perishable, and constant repairs are necessary. Nearly a million sterling was spent on completing the building, a modest sum for so considerable a work judged by the spacious standards of our own spendthrift time. The funds were raised from pious founders, from state help, and from lotteries. Whether or not you admire the exterior of the cathedral--personally the answer is in the negative--there can be nothing but praise for the enterprise which made a success of the failure of the centuries and the fine solid work to which the completed Dom bears witness. In 1880, six hundred years after the original founding of the cathedral by Archbishop Conrad, the final stone of the giant blossom crowning the south tower was swung into place in the presence of the Emperor William I.