st the night's wage, assist the skirmish on
with incendiary quip and tender touch of foot and similar cantharides of
financial amour. And we track them later to such institutions as the
Fledermaus--"_der grosse luxurioese, vornehmstes vergnuegungsplatz,
paradiesgarten, groesste sehenswuerdigkeit Berlins_" (in the
advertisements)--as the Victoria and the Cafe Riche, the Westminster and
the Cafe Opera and--

* * *

"Berlin spirit, huh!" _they_ are telling _their_ wives a month
later--"Berlin spirit? All artificial. Just to make money out of the
visitors. And _very_ sordid!"

* * *

Ah, Cairo dreaming in the Nile's moon-haze--are you to be judged thus
by the narrow street that snakes into the dark of Bulak? And Budapest by
the Danube--are you to be judged by the wreckage of the Stefansplatz
that has drifted on your shores? And you, Vienna, and you, Paris--are
you, too, to be measured thus, as measured you are, by the crimson light
of your half-worlds that for some obscures your stars?

The Berlin of the Palais de Danse is the Paris of L'Abbaye; the Berlin
of the Fledermaus is the New York of Jack's.

But the Berlin that I know and love is not this Berlin, the Berlin of
Americans, not the spangled Berlin, the hollow-laughing Berlin, the
Berlin decked with rhinestones, set alight with prismatic electroliers
and offered up as mistress to foreign gold. When the River Spree is
amethystine under springtime skies and the city's lights are yellow in
the linden trees, I like best the Berlin that sips its beer in the peace
of the little by-streets, the Berlin that laughs in the Tiergarten near
the Lake of the Goldfish and on the Isle of Louisa, where watch
throughout eternity the graven images of Friedrich Wilhelm the Third and
of Wilhelm the First in the years of his boyhood. I like best the Berlin
that sings with the students in the undiscovered, untainted _wein_ and
_bier stuben_ of the thitherward thoroughfares, the Berlin that dances
in the Joachimstrasse, where the _maedels_, each to herself a Cecilie,
shirtwaisted, poor, happy, kick up their German heels, drink up their
German beer, assault the Schweizerkaese and bring back memories of that
paradise of all paradises--the Englischer Garten of Munich the
Incomparable, the Divine.

In such phases of this kaiser city, one is removed from the so-called
Tingel-Tangel, or _varietes_ and cabarets, where the visiting
_narrverein_ is regal