ou smiling. I
knew that the back premises of these big German hives might harbour
any social grade and almost any industry, and for a long time I vowed
that some one must live in our court whose business it was to hammer
tin, and that he hammered it most late at night and early in the
morning. I had not heard anything like the noise since I had lived in
a high narrow German street paved with cobble-stones, and occupied
just opposite my windows by a brewer whose vans returned to him at
daybreak and tumbled empty casks at his door. But I never discovered
my tin merchant in Berlin, and in time I had to admit that my hosts
were right. The noise I complained of was made by the cook washing up
in the opposite kitchen. I should not have noticed it if I had been a
sensible person, and slept with my curtains drawn and my double
windows tight shut.

Of course, there are some quiet streets in Berlin, and there are
charming homes in the "garden-houses." Some of the quadrangles are
built round a garden instead of a paved yard, and then you can get a
quiet pleasant flat with a balcony that looks on a garden instead of a
street. The traditional plan of a Berlin flat is most inconvenient and
unpractical. In old-fashioned houses, and even in houses built sixteen
years ago or less, you find that one of the chief rooms is the only
thoroughfare between the bedrooms near the kitchen premises and the
rooms near the front door. Anyone occupying one of these back rooms,
which are often good ones, can only get to the front door by way of
this thoroughfare, where he will usually find the family gathered
together; the maid, too, must pass through every time the door bell
rings, and when she goes about her business in the front regions her
brooms and pails must pass through with her. The window of this room,
which is known as a _Berliner Zimmer_, is always in one corner and
lights it insufficiently. The Berliners themselves recognise its
disadvantages, but I like to describe it, because I observe amongst the
Germans of to-day a fierce determination to destroy and deny everything
a foreigner might call a little absurd, even if it is characteristic;
so I feel sure that if I go to Berlin a few years hence there will not
be a _Berliner Zimmer_ left in the city, and no Berliner will ever have
seen or heard of one; nor will the flat doors have the quaint little
peepholes through which the maid's eye may be seen appraising you
before she lets you in. Th