are more rational and even utilitarian than the fashions of modernity.  When a street in a new suburb is called Pretoria Avenue, the clerk living there does not set out from his villa with the cheerful hope of finding the road lead him to Pretoria.  But the man leaving Aylesbury End does know it would lead him to Aylesbury; and the man going out at the Damascus Gate did know it would lead him to Damascus.  And the same is true of the next and last of the old entrances, the Jaffa Gate in the east; but when I saw that I saw something else as well.

I have heard that there is a low doorway at the entrance to a famous shrine which is called the Gate of Humility; but indeed in this sense all gates are gates of humility, and especially gates of this kind.  Any one who has ever looked at a landscape under an archway will know what I mean, when I say that it sharpens a pleasure with a strange sentiment of privilege.  It adds to the grace of distance something that makes it not only a grace but a gift.  Such are the visions of remote places that appear in the low gateways of a Gothic town; as if each gateway led into a separate world; and almost as if each dome of sky were a different chamber.  But he who walks round the walls of this city in this spirit will come suddenly upon an exception which will surprise him like an earthquake.  It looks indeed rather like something done by an earthquake; an earthquake with a half-witted sense of humour.  Immediately at the side of one of these humble and human gateways there is a great gap in the wall, with a wide road running through it.  There is something of unreason in the sight which affects the eye as well as the reason.  It recalls some crazy tale about the great works of the Wise Men of Gotham.  It suggests the old joke about the man who made a small hole for the kitten as well as a large hole for the cat.  Everybody has read about it by this time; but the immediate impression of it is not merely an effect of reading or even of reasoning.  It looks lop-sided; like something done by a one-eyed giant.  But it was done by the last prince of the great Prussian imperial system, in what was probably the proudest moment in all his life of pride.

What is true has a way of sounding trite; and what is trite has a way of sounding false.  We shall now probably weary the world with calling the Germans barbaric, just as we very recently wearied the world with calling them cultured and progressive and scientific.  But the thing is true though we say it a thousand times.  And any one who wishes to understand the sense in which it is true has only to contemplate that fantasy and fallacy in stone; a gate with an open road beside it.  The quality I mean, however, is not merely in that particular contrast; as of a front door standing by itself in an open field.  It is also in the origin, the occasion and the whole story of the thing.  There is above all this supreme stamp of the barbarian; the sacrifice of the permanent to the temporary.