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in Berlin or the New Palace in Potsdam, and at the same time avoid the dry and dusty descriptions of the guide-books. If the reader is not in Berlin, let him imagine the fragment of a mediaeval town, situated on a river and fronted by a bridge; and on the bank of the river a dark, square, massive and weather-stained pile of four stories, with barred windows on the ground floor as defence against a possibly angry populace, and a sentry-box at each of its two lofty wrought-iron gates. It may be, as Baedeker informs us it is, a "handsome example of the German renaissance," but to the foreigner it can as equally suggest a large and grimy barracks as the five-hundred-years-old palace of a long line of kings and emperors. And yet, to any one acquainted with the blood-stained annals of Prussian history, who knows something of the massive stone buildings about it and of the people who have inhabited them, who strolls through its interior divided into sombre squares, each with its cold and bare parade-ground, who reflects on the relations between king and people, closely identified by their historical associations, yet sundered by the feudal spirit which still keeps the Crown at a distance from the crowd, above all to the German versed in his country's story--how eloquently it speaks! When one thinks of the Court of Berlin one should not forget that the New Palace, the Emperor's residence at Potsdam, sixteen miles distant from the capital, is as much, and as important, a part of it as the royal palace in Berlin itself. The Emperor divides his time between them, the former, when he is not travelling, being his more permanent residence, and the latter only claiming his presence during the winter season and for periods of a day or so at other parts of the year, when occasion requires it. It is only during the six or eight weeks of the winter season that the Empress and her daughter, Princess Victoria Louise (now Duchess of Brunswick), go into residence at the Berlin royal palace. There is a railway between Potsdam and Berlin, but since the introduction of the motor-car the Emperor almost always uses that means of conveyance for the half-hour's run between his Berlin and Potsdam palaces. The other section of the Court, if Potsdam may be so described, is hardly less rich in memories than the old palace by the Spree. Indeed it is richer from the cosmopolitan point of view, for though Frederick the Great was born in the Berlin Sch
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