A cloister, or at least a gallery, a fragment of an ancient monastery, presented itself to view.  This colonnade ran the whole length of the square, at the end of which stood the Marienkirche, a brick church of the fourteenth century.  Continuing my walk, I found myself in a market-place, where awaited me one of those sights which repay the traveler for much fatigue:  a public building of a new, unforeseen, original aspect, the old Stadthaus in which was formerly the Hanse hall, rose suddenly before me.

It occupies two sides of the square.  Imagine, in front of the Marienkirche, whose spires and roof of oxydized copper rise above it, a lofty brick facade, blackened by time, bristling with three bell-towers with pointed copper-covered roofs, having two great empty rose-windows, and emblazoned with escutcheons inscribed in the trefoils of its ogives, double-headed black eagles on a gold field, and shields, half gules, half argent, ranged alternately, and executed in the most elaborate fashion of heraldry.

To this facade is joined a palazzino of the Renaissance, in stone and of an entirely different style, its tint of grayish-white marvelously relieved by the dark-red background of old brick-work.  This building, with its three gables, its fluted Ionic columns, its caryatides, or rather its Atlases (for they are human figures), its semicircular window, its niches curved like a shell, its arcades ornamented with figures, its basement of diamond-shaped stones, produces what I may call an architectural discord that is most unexpected and charming.  We meet very few edifices in the north of Europe of this style and epoch.

In the facade, the old German style prevails:  arches of brick, resting upon short granite columns, support a gallery with ogive-windows.  A row of blazons, inclined from right to left, bring out their brilliant color against the blackish tint of the wall.  It would be difficult to form an idea of the character and richness of this ornamentation.

This gallery leads into the main building, a structure than which no scene-painter, seeking a medieval decoration for an opera, ever invented anything more picturesque and singular.  Five turrets, coiffed with roofs like extinguishers, raise their pointed tops above the main line of the facade with its lofty ogive-windows—­unhappily now most of them partially bricked up, in accordance, doubtless, with the exigencies of alterations made within.  Eight great disks, having gold backgrounds, and representing radiating suns, double-headed eagles, and the shields, gules and argent, the armorial bearings of Luebeck, are spread out gorgeously upon this quaint architecture.  Beneath, arches supported upon short, thick pillars yawn darkly, and from far within there comes the gleam of precious metals, the wares of some goldsmith’s shop.