is dropt from the top to the time when it strikes the water beneath.  Passages lead from the water’s edge to the Rathaus, by which prisoners came formerly to draw water, and to St. John’s Churchyard and other points outside the town.  The system of underground passages here and in the Castle was an important part of the defenses, affording as it did a means of communication with the outer world and as a last extremity, in the case of a siege, a means of escape.

Meanwhile, leaving the Deep Well and passing some insignificant modern dwellings, and leaving beneath us on the left the Himmelsthor, let us approach the summit of the rock and the buildings of the Kaiserburg itself.  As we advance to the gateway with the intention of ringing the bell for the castellan, we notice on the left the Double Chapel, attaching to the Heathen Tower, the lower part of which is encrusted with what were once supposed to be Pagan images.  The Tower protrudes beyond the face of the third plateau, and its prominence may indicate the width of a trench, now filled in, which was once dug outside the enclosing wall of the summit of the rock.  The whole of the south side of this plateau is taken up by the “Palast” (the vast hall, two stories high, which, tho it has been repeatedly rebuilt, may in its original structure be traced back as far as the twelfth century), and the “Kemnate” or dwelling-rooms which seem to have been without any means of defense.  This plateau, like the second, is supplied with a well.  But the first object that strikes the eye on entering the court-yard is the ruined limetree, the branches of which once spread their broad and verdant shelter over the whole extent of the quadrangle.

On leaving the Castle we find ourselves in the Burgstrasse, called in the old days Unter der Veste, which was probably the High Street of the old town.  Off both sides of this street and of the Bergstrasse ran narrow crooked little alleys lined with wooden houses of which time and fire have left scarcely any trace.  As you wander round the city tracing the line of the old walls, you are struck by the general air of splendor.  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 splendor of Nuremberg in her proudest days.  But you will also come upon a hundred crooked little streets and narrow alleys, which, tho entrancingly picturesque, tell of yet other days and other conditions.