But our conductress has a regular guide's trot,
inexorable as fate; so on we go.
Wittenberg is now a mean little town; all looks poor and low; yet it
seems like a place that has seen better days. Houses, now used as
paltry shops, have, some of them, carved oaken doors, with antic
freaks of architecture, which seem to signify that their former owners
were able to make a figure in the world. In fact, the houses seem a
sort of phantasmagoria of decayed gentlefolk, in the faded, tarnished,
old-fashioned finery of the past. Our guide halts her trot suddenly
before a house, which she announces as that of Louis Cranach; then on
she goes. Louis is dead, and Magdalen, his wife, also; so there is no
one there to welcome us; on we go also. Once Louis was a man of more
consequence.
Now we come to Luther's house--a part of the old convent. Wide yawns
the stone doorway of the court; a grinning masque grotesquely looks
down from its centre, and odd carvings from the sides. A colony of
swallows have established their nests among the queer old carvings and
gnome-like faces, and are twittering in and out, superintending their
domestic arrangements.
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