e knowledge, the Yankee applies it.
This goes to prove my point.

We Americans are a curious people. We get better music under our own
vine and fig-tree than they have anywhere else in the world but we don't
know it. There is no such band on earth as Sousa's, no better orchestra
than Theodore Thomas's or the Boston Symphony, and we hear the
Metropolitan and French operas.

Take also our chamber music and from that come down to our street
ballads, and then to the whistling and singing heard in the streets,
with no thought of audience or even listeners.

I have followed German music closely, and I claim that German
musicians, or rather let me say German producers of music, lack ear just
about half of the time. Their students cannot compare with our college
singing, their pedestrian parties, which one meets all through the
country, singing, often from notes (and if you take the trouble to
inquire, they will frequently tell you with pride that they belong to
such and such a singing society) almost drive sensitive ears crazy. But
they love it--they adore music, they take such comfort out of it, that
one is forced to forgive this lack of ear and this polyglot pitch, or
else be considered a churl.

The Orangerie has, however, a very good average band--for Germany. The
picture of the great crowd of people gathered at little tables around
the band-stand, whole families together; of a tiny boy baby, just able
to toddle around, being dragged about by an enormous St. Bernard dog,
whose chain the baby tugged at most valiantly; the long dim avenues
under the trees where an occasional young couple lost themselves from
fathers and mothers; the music; the cheerful beer-drinking; the general
air of rosy-cheeked contentment has formed in my mind a most agreeable
recollection of the Orangerie of Strasburg.

Strasburg has, however, much more to boast of than her clock. The city
was founded by the Romans, and in the middle ages was one of the most
powerful of the free cities of the German Empire, on the occasions of
imperial processions her citizens enjoying the proud distinction of
having their banner borne second only to the imperial eagle.

Then, because of its strategical importance, in a time of peace, Louis
XIV. of France seized the city of Strasburg, and this delicate attention
on his part was confirmed by the Peace of Ryswick in 1679, thereby
giving Strasburg to France. The French kept it nearly two hundred years,
but Germany