,
gigantic, imposing, impressive. I had had no intimate acquaintance
with linden-trees--and I wouldn't know one now if I should see it--but
I had an idea from the name--linden, linden--that it was grand and
waving; not so grand as an oak nor so waving as a willow, but a cross
between the two. I knew that I should see these great monarchs making
a giant arch over this broad avenue and mingling their tossing
branches overhead.

What I found when I arrived was a broad, handsome street. But those
lindens! They are consumptive, stunted little saplings without
sufficient energy to grow into real trees. They are set so far apart
that you have time to forget one before you come to another, and as to
their appearance--we have some just like them in Chicago where there
is a leak in the gas-pipes near their roots.

On the day before Christmas we felt very low in our minds. We had the
doleful prospect ahead of us of eating Christmas dinner alone in a
strange country, and in a hotel at that, so we started out shopping.
Not that we needed a thing, but it is our rule, "When you have the
blues, go shopping." It always cures you to spend money.

Berlin shop-windows are much more fascinating even than those of
Paris, because in Berlin there are so many more things that you can
afford to buy that Paris seems expensive in comparison. We became so
much interested in the Christmas display that we did not notice the
flight of time. When we had bought several heavy things to weigh our
trunks down a little more and to pay extra luggage on, I happened to
glance at the sun, and it was just above the horizon. It looked to be
about four o'clock in the afternoon, and we had had nothing to eat
since nine o'clock, and even then only a cup of coffee. I felt myself
suddenly grow faint and weak. "Heavens!" I said, "see what time it is!
We have shopped all day and we have forgotten to get our luncheon."

My companion glanced at her watch.

"It's only half past eleven o'clock by my watch. I couldn't have wound
it last night. No, it is going."

"Perhaps the hands stick. They do on mine. Whenever I wind it, I have
to hit it with the hair-brush to start it; and even then it loses time
every day."

"Let's take them both to a jeweller," she said. "We can't travel with
watches which act this way."

So we left them to be repaired, and as we came out, I said, "It will
take us half an hour to get back to the hotel. Don't you think we
ought to go in somew