f the baggage clerk and the reluctance of the porters a more
piercing distress than any he had known at the railroad stations; and
one luckless valise which he ordered sent after him by express reached
his bankers in Paris a fortnight overdue, with an accumulation of
charges upon it outvaluing the books which it contained.

But these were minor defects in an establishment which had many merits,
and was mainly of the temperament and intention of the large English
railroad hotels. They looked from their windows down into a gardened
square, peopled with a full share of the superabounding statues of
Berlin and frequented by babies and nurse maids who seemed not to mind
the cold any more than the stone kings and generals. The aspect of this
square, like the excellent cooking of the hotel and the architecture of
the imperial capital, suggested the superior civilization of Paris. Even
the rows of gray houses and private palaces of Berlin are in the French
taste, which is the only taste there is in Berlin. The suggestion of
Paris is constant, but it is of Paris in exile, and without the chic
which the city wears in its native air. The crowd lacks this as much as
the architecture and the sculpture; there is no distinction among the
men except for now and then a military figure, and among the women no
style such as relieves the commonplace rash of the New York streets. The
Berliners are plain and ill dressed, both men and women, and even the
little children are plain. Every one is ill dressed, but no one is
ragged, and among the undersized homely folk of the lower classes there
is no such poverty-stricken shabbiness as shocks and insults the sight
in New York. That which distinctly recalls our metropolis is the lofty
passage of the elevated trains intersecting the prospectives of many
streets; but in Berlin the elevated road is carried on massive brick
archways and not lifted upon gay, crazy iron ladders like ours.

When you look away from this, and regard Berlin on its aesthetic, side
you are again in that banished Paris, whose captive art-soul is made
to serve, so far as it may be enslaved to such an effect, in the
celebration of the German triumph over France. Berlin has never
the presence of a great capital, however, in spite of its perpetual
monumental insistence. There is no streaming movement in broad vistas;
the dull looking population moves sluggishly; there is no show of fine
equipages. The prevailing tone of the city a