er was in a fever of patriotism and rage against the French
before his description was finished, and the faces of the girls
kindled in response. "They will some time," I thought, "be lovers,
wives, mothers of Prussian soldiers themselves, and this training will
keep alive in the home the national fire."

Admirable schools they all were, the presence of the spiked helmet
notwithstanding, and crowning them in the great Prussian educational
system came the famous universities. That at Berlin counted its
students by thousands, its professors by hundreds. There was no branch
of human knowledge without its teacher. One could study Egyptian
hieroglyphics or the Assyrian arrow-head inscriptions. A new pimple
could hardly break out on the blotched face of the moon, without
a lecture from a professor next day to explain the theory of its
development. The poor earthquakes were hardly left to shake in peace
an out-of-the-way strip of South American coast or Calabrian plain,
but a German professor violated their privacy, undertook to see whence
they came and whither they went, and even tried to predict when they
would go to shaking again. The vast building of the University stood
on Unter den Linden, opposite the palace of the king. Large as it was,
its halls were crowded at the end of every hour by the thousand or two
of young men, who presently disappeared within the lecture-rooms.
Here in past years had been Hegel and Fichte, the brothers Grimm, the
brothers Humboldt, Niebuhr, and Carl Ritter. Here in my time, were
Lepsius and Curtius, Virchow and Hoffman, Ranke and Mommsen,--the
world's first scholars in the past and present. The student selected
his lecturers, then went day by day through the semester to the plain
lecture-rooms, taking notes diligently at benches which had been
whittled well by his predecessors, and where he too most likely
carved his own autograph and perhaps the name of the dear girl he
adored,--for Yankee boys have no monopoly of the jack-knife.

Where could one find the spiked helmet in the midst of the scholastic
quiet and diligence of a German university? It was visible enough in
more ways than one. Here was one manifestation. Run down the long list
of professors and teachers in the _Anzeiger_, and you would find
somewhere in the list the _Fechtmeister_, instructor in fighting,
master of the sword exercise, and he was pretty sure to be one of
the busiest men in the company. To most German students, a swo