with inoffensive eyes so far
as they looked at her. She declared that personally there was nothing
against the Prussians; even when in uniform they were kindly and
modest-looking men; it was when they got up on pedestals, in bronze or
marble, that they, began to bully and to brag.

LXIV.

The dinner which the Marches got at a restaurant on Unter den Linden
almost redeemed the avenue from the disgrace it had fallen into with
them. It was, the best meal they had yet eaten in Europe, and as to fact
and form was a sort of compromise between a French dinner and an English
dinner which they did not hesitate to pronounce Prussian. The waiter
who served it was a friendly spirit, very sensible of their intelligent
appreciation of the dinner; and from him they formed a more respectful
opinion of Berlin civilization than they had yet held. After the manner
of strangers everywhere they judged the country they were visiting from
such of its inhabitants as chance brought them in contact with; and it
would really be a good thing for nations that wish to stand well with
the world at large to look carefully to the behavior of its cabmen and
car conductors, its hotel clerks and waiters, its theatre-ticket sellers
and ushers, its policemen and sacristans, its landlords and salesmen;
for by these rather than by its society women and its statesmen and
divines, is it really judged in the books of travellers; some attention
also should be paid to the weather, if the climate is to be praised. In
the railroad cafe at Potsdam there was a waiter so rude to the Marches
that if they had not been people of great strength of character he
would have undone the favorable impression the soldiers and civilians
of Berlin generally had been at such pains to produce in them; and
throughout the week of early September which they passed there, it
rained so much and so bitterly, it was so wet and so cold, that they
might have come away thinking it's the worst climate in the world, if
it had not been for a man whom they saw in one of the public gardens
pouring a heavy stream from his garden hose upon the shrubbery already
soaked and shuddering in the cold. But this convinced them that they
were suffering from weather and not from the climate, which must really
be hot and dry; and they went home to their hotel and sat contentedly
down in a temperature of sixty degrees. The weather, was not always
so bad; one day it was dry cold instead of wet cold, with