house of the family of Stallburg, and several strongholds, in later days transformed into dwellings and warehouses.  No architecture of an elevating kind was then to be seen in Frankfort; and every thing pointed to a period long past and unquiet, both for town and district.  Gates and towers, which defined the bounds of the old city,—­then, farther on again, gates, towers, walls, bridges, ramparts, moats, with which the new city was encompassed,—­all showed, but too plainly, that a necessity for guarding the common weal in disastrous times had induced these arrangements, that all the squares and streets, even the newest, broadest, and best laid out, owed their origin to chance and caprice, and not to any regulating mind.  A certain liking for the antique was thus implanted in the boy, and was specially nourished and promoted by old chronicles and woodcuts, as, for instance, those of Grave relating to the siege of Frankfort.  At the same time a different taste was developed in him for observing the conditions of mankind in their manifold variety and naturalness, without regard to their importance or beauty.  It was, therefore, one of our favorite walks, which we endeavored to take now and then in the course of a year, to follow the circuit of the path inside the city-walls.  Gardens, courts, and back buildings extend to the Zwinger; and we saw many thousand people amid their little domestic and secluded circumstances.  From the ornamental and show gardens of the rich, to the orchards of the citizen, anxious about his necessities; from thence to the factories, bleaching-grounds, and similar establishments, even to the burying-grounds,—­for a little world lay within the limits of the city,—­we passed a varied, strange spectacle, which changed at every step, and with the enjoyment of which our childish curiosity was never satisfied.  In fact, the celebrated Devil-upon-two-sticks, when he lifted the roofs of Madrid at night, scarcely did more for his friend than was here done for us in the bright sunshine and open air.  The keys that were to be made use of in this journey, to gain us a passage through many a tower, stair, and postern, were in the hands of the authorities, whose subordinates we never failed to coax into good humor.

But a more important, and in one sense more fruitful, place for us, was the city-hall, named from the Romans.  In its lower vault-like rooms we liked but too well to lose ourselves.  We obtained an entrance, too, into the large and very simple session-room of the council.  The walls as well as the arched ceiling were white, though wainscoted to a certain height; and the whole was without a trace of painting, or any kind of carved work; only, high up on the middle wall, might be read this brief inscription:—­

“One man’s word is no man’s word: 
Justice needs that both be heard.”