wift.
On the other hand they are comfortably cushioned, and they are never
overcrowded. The line is at times above, at times below the houses, and
at times on a level with them, alike in city and in suburbs. The train
whirled out of thickly built districts, past the backs of the old
houses, into outskirts thinly populated, with new houses springing up
without order or continuity among the meadows and vegetable-gardens, and
along the ready-made, elm-planted avenues, where wooden fences divided
the vacant lots. Everywhere the city was growing out over the country,
in blocks and detached edifices of limestone, sandstone, red and yellow
brick, larger or smaller, of no more uniformity than our suburban
dwellings, but never of their ugliness or lawless offensiveness.

In an effort for the intimate life of the country March went two
successive mornings for his breakfast to the Cafe Bauer, which has some
admirable wall-printings, and is the chief cafe on Unter den Linden; but
on both days there were more people in the paintings than out of them.
The second morning the waiter who took his order recognized him and
asked, "Wie gestern?" and from this he argued an affectionate constancy
in the Berliners, and a hospitable observance of the tastes of
strangers. At his bankers, on the other hand, the cashier scrutinized
his signature and remarked that it did not look like the signature in
his letter of credit, and then he inferred a suspicious mind in the
moneyed classes of Prussia; as he had not been treated with such unkind
doubt by Hebrew bankers anywhere, he made a mental note that the Jews
were politer than the Christians in Germany. In starting for Potsdam he
asked a traeger where the Potsdam train was and the man said, "Dat train
dare," and in coming back he helped a fat old lady out of the car, and
she thanked him in English. From these incidents, both occurring the
same day in the same place, the inference of a widespread knowledge of
our language in all classes of the population was inevitable.

In this obvious and easy manner he studied contemporary civilization in
the capital. He even carried his researches farther, and went one rainy
afternoon to an exhibition of modern pictures in a pavilion of the
Thiergarten, where from the small attendance he inferred an indifference
to the arts which he would not ascribe to the weather. One evening at a
summer theatre where they gave the pantomime of the 'Puppenfee' and the
operetta