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streets, and at last succeeded in coming out the other side, immediately beneath the grotesque stone denkmal , two hundred feet high, which was erected to commemorate the ‘Battle of the Nations’, the defeat that sent Napoleon to Elba – a shapeless mass resembling a squat chimney-stack built on the scale of the Great Pyramid. We also passed through the famous square where the allied troops were reviewed after the conflict.
    Half a mile further on we ran into a bank backwards and doubled up the exhaust pipe, so that it now rent the ground with a loud tearing noise whenever Diana came down particularly heavily over any bump. Without a halt we continued our way to Altenburg, where we were obliged to stop, after seven hours uninterrupted driving, not for tea, but for petrol. This was Roumanian and unsatisfactory. The youth who filled the tank disliked us so much that he refused a tip. We passed through Plauen and stopped again to put on our coats.
    As evening fell, the road led over the uplands; we were entering Bavaria. The flat country gave place to undulating hills covered with pinewoods, not of that familiar inky grey, but a lovely deep green, stretching away amongst yellow fields of corn and rich grassy valleys, till the blue horizon, still undulating, merged into a dull and misty lilac sunset. Gradually it became dark and we could smell the sweet scent of the pines that rose steep on either side as we whistled down the valleys; we could hear the trickle of streams; and could breathe the sharp fresh gusts of upland air as we climbed the hills again.
    Bayreuth was but a pattern of lights. Simon hugged his stomach; I fell asleep. At half-past eleven we were on the Nuremberg tramlines when we again ran out of petrol. The spare tank was hauled from beneath the suitcases, a funnel formed of an Illustrated London News, and at twenty minutes to midnight, exactly twelve hours after leaving Berlin, we drew up outside the Hotel Palast-Fürstenhof, having touched neither food nor drink the whole day, and having made two stops of one and two minutes respectively.
    We had a delicious meal of cold ham, poached eggs, and light beer brought up to our bedroom, and then slept soundly.
    Nuremberg is the apotheosis of the tourist-town. There flourishes about her streets that kind of obvious antiquity, those over-ornamented crooked gables and twisted turrets, that appeal most strongly to those who love Age for its own sake, without being able to distinguish the textural beauty,and in some cases damage, that it can confer. It can be seen at a glance that these buildings are ‘Old’. They shout Oldness. It needs no artistic acumen to tell that they were built without the aid of plumb-line and set-square. Nuremberg, in fact, is a place without atmosphere. Its main streets are lined with hotels and antique-shops and the buildings convey the same impression of affectation as the baronial rafters of the Queen’s Hotel, Margate. After visiting the bank and being refused a cup of coffee at the ‘Blue Bottle’, we had lunch, and set out to drive the sixty-five miles to Rothenburg.
    The Bavarian countryside is the most attractive in Central Europe. Rather than bewitching, it appears bewitched. Its mannerisms are those of the Albertian Christians. Santa Claus, who only visits other countries in the winter, makes this his home; and somehow, even in the bright August sunlight, with veitches and blue cranesbill growing from the long grass by the side of the narrow white roads, the idea seemed to have no incongruity about it. The villages and market towns consist of long twisted rows of white houses, sometimes frescoed with angels, which are drawn and tinted rather than painted. The roof of each house is half as high again as the side walls, and if old, it leans heavily towards its neighbour, or bellies the isosceles triangle of wall on which it rests out into the roadway. There is a fresh, clean atmosphere. The farmyard and the road are one, which