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makes motoring difficult. Little girls with tight, fair plaits scurry their flocks of geese out of the way. Bent and aged women, with brown, wrinkled faces peering from out their black handkerchiefs, may be seen going out in twos and threes to work in the fields. Everywhere the arms of the old kingdom are displayed, blue and white diagonal lozenges. In most of the villages are poles, a hundred feet or more high, which are striped round and round in blue and white and surmounted by a wreath hanging from the top. From these poles jut horizontal arms on which are placed innumerable painted, wooden toys, men on bicycles, motor cars, churches and animals.
    On every second hill is perched a schloss , generally baroque, with a massive rounded tower or two surviving from an older fortress. Many of the schlossen , however, are situated in the middle of the towns, such as the enormous and very fine rococo palace at Ansbach, home of George II’s queen. The Bavarian baroque is pleasant and not unwieldy, the churches being covered in a sort of yellow wash. Catholicism is very evident in the numerous shrines and figures of saints, in agitated stone draperies and iron halos, that guard the bridges on the road. Bavaria is the most German part of Germany; here all the ‘Youth’ movements originated, the country being especially suited to walking-tours. And it is here, more than in Prussia, that the survival of militarism is to be feared. The Crown Prince Rupprecht is still the most powerful man in the province. Monarchism will always evoke sympathy. But an independent Bavaria in her present frame of mind would not conduce to the peace of Europe.
    Eventually, after taking a wrong turning out of Ansbach and being compelled to enquire the way of one of the witches of the field, we arrived at Rothenburg about four o’clock. This town surpasses belief. It is as though all the goblin haunts, palaces and fortress towers of fairyland were writhing in an elongated distortion glass; and yet, unlike those of Nuremberg, they ring true. There is a subtle distinction between the two towns. Both are visited by tourists, but Rothenberg by Germans only. Whereas Nuremberg is a conglomeration of all dates and styles, Rothenburg was built in the later Middle Ages and not a stone has been added or subtracted since. Her buildings are the more preposterous, but they do not suffer from that clustering ornamentation reminiscent of Burmese temples, with which the gables of Nuremberg are loaded. Rothenburg is a complete walled ‘burg’ of the Middle Ages. The walls have remained intact; at them, therefore, the town ends. In the fields beyond struggle one or two pink villas; that is all.
    Entrance is effected through a series of gatehouses that are in themselves scarcely credible. From a central archway radiatetwo arc-shaped walls ending in a couple of round flanking turrets, with high-pitched, conical roofs. Over the actual gateway rises a tower, square in shape, and over sixty feet in height, up which runs a succession of little windows; while at the top, under the projecting eaves of a twisted and pagoda-like tiled roof, is a tiny house, having a row of these windows back and front, each embowered with a window-box. From one depends a string, on the end of which is a basket in which to haul up food. Here, surely, is a domicile reached only on a broomstick. In reality it is probably the dwelling of a neatly-dressed jeweller’s assistant, newly married, who, owing to the housing shortage, is obliged to live either with his mother- in-law , or up 130 stairs.
    The streets of the town shelve and twist like mountain paths. The roofs of the houses reach as high and half as high again as the walls on which they rest. Every window has its window-box , filled with geraniums, lobelia, and marguerites. At the end of the town furthest from the gate by which we entered, runs a street of magnificent old stone houses, into the front walls of which have been built, haphazard,