a
summer theatre where they gave the pantomime of the 'Puppenfee' and the
operetta of 'Hansel and Gretel', he observed that the greater part of the
audience was composed of nice plain young girls and children, and he
noted that there was no sort of evening dress; from the large number of
Americans present he imagined a numerous colony in Berlin, where they
mast have an instinctive sense of their co-nationality, since one of them
in the stress of getting his hat and overcoat when they all came out,
confidently addressed him in English. But he took stock of his
impressions with his wife, and they seemed to him so few, after all, that
he could not resist a painful sense of isolation in the midst of the
environment.

They made a Sunday excursion to the Zoological Gardens in the
Thiergarten, with a large crowd of the lower classes, but though they had
a great deal of trouble in getting there by the various kinds of
horsecars and electric cars, they did not feel that they had got near to
the popular life. They endeavored for some sense of Berlin society by
driving home in a drosky, and on the way they passed rows of beautiful
houses, in French and Italian taste, fronting the deep, damp green park
from the Thiergartenstrasse, in which they were confident cultivated and
delightful people lived; but they remained to the last with nothing but
their unsupported conjecture.

LXV.

Their excursion to Potsdam was the cream of their sojourn in Berlin. They
chose for it the first fair morning, and they ran out over the flat sandy
plains surrounding the capital, and among the low hills surrounding
Potsdam before it actually began to rain.

They wished immediately to see Sans Souci for the great Frederick's sake,
and they drove through a lively shower to the palace, where they waited
with a horde of twenty-five other tourists in a gusty colonnade before
they were led through Voltaire's room and Frederick's death chamber.

The French philosopher comes before the Prussian prince at Sans Souci
even in the palatial villa which expresses the wilful caprice of the
great Frederick as few edifices have embodied the whims or tastes of
their owners. The whole affair is eighteenth-century French, as the
Germans conceived it. The gardened terrace from which the low, one-story
building, thickly crusted with baroque sculptures, looks down into a
many-colored parterre, was luxuriantly French, and sentimentally French
the colonnaded front op