ion, were always hot. When they were ready to go,
March experienced from the apathy of 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 mo