Page:Balthasar Hübmaier.djvu/215

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[1526–1528]
At Nikolsburg
147

no doubt, by memory of what he had experienced at Zürich, and especially by recollection that physical weakness and love of life had led him to deny the truth.

He must have felt that the lines had fallen to him in pleasant places. The Nikolsburg of to-day is a delightfully quaint town, of a pronounced mediæval flavour. It is out of the beaten track of globetrotters, difficult of access, and hence seldom visited by the ordinary tourist. The old walls have disappeared, but the city has availed itself little of its liberty to straggle into the fields. The houses are grouped as of old about the steep, rocky hill, whose summit is occupied by the castle and the church—houses low and long, built flush with the street and entered from the street level, or at most by one or two rude stone steps; houses solidly built of stone, with red-tiled roofs, from which little, wicked-looking windows wink at the foreigner as he passes by. The bright and curious costumes of the peasants who throng the streets on a gala day are an added touch of mediævalism, for they are the same that have been worn for countless generations. Little but German is spoken in the town, and the