 This is Section 4 of Mark Twain's travel letters from 1891 to 1992. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. An Austrian Health Factory, by Mark Twain. Read by John Greenman, with help from Eberhard Schneider. This place is the village of Marienbad Bohemiel. It seems no very great distance from Anassi in Haute Savoie to this place. You make it in less than thirty hours by these continental express trains, but the changes in the scenery are great. They are quite out of proportion to the distance covered. From Anassi by Ex to Geneva you have blue lakes with bold mountains springing from their borders and far glimpses of snowy wastes lifted against the horizon beyond, while all about you is a garden cultivated to the last possibility of grace and beauty, a cultivation which doesn't stop with handy lower levels, but is carried right up to the sheer steeps and propped there with ribs of masonry and made to stay there in spite of Newton's law. Beyond Geneva, beyond Lausanne, at any rate, you have for a while a country which noticeably resembles New England, and seems out of place, and like an intruder, an intruder who is wearing his everyday clothes at a fancy dress-ball. But presently on your right huge green mountain ramparts rise up, and after that, for hours, you are absorbed in watching the rich shadow effects which they furnish, and are only dolly aware that New England is gone, and that you are flying past quaint and unspeakably old towns and towers. Next day you have the Lake of Zurich, and presently the Rhine is swinging by you. How clean it is, how clear it is, how blue it is, how green it is, how swift and rollicking and insolent is its gait and style, how vivid and splendid its colours, beautiful wreck and chaos of all the soap bubbles in the universe. A person born on the Rhine must worship it. I saw the blue Rhine sweep along, I heard or seemed to hear, the German songs we used to sing in chorus, sweet and clear. Yes, that is where his heart would be, that is where his last thoughts would be, the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers. And by and by you are in a German region which you discover to be quite different from the recent Swiss lands behind you. You have a sea before you, that is to say, the green land goes rolling away in ocean swells to the horizon. And there is another new feature. Here and there at wide intervals you have islands, hills two hundred and three hundred feet high of a haystack form that rise abruptly out of the green plain and are wooded solidly to the top. On the top there is just room for a ruined castle. And there it is every time. Above the summit you see the crumbling arches and broken towers projecting. Beyond Stuttgart next day you find other changes still. By and by, approaching and leaving Nuremberg and down by a new house, your landscape is humped everywhere with scattered knobs of rock, unsociable crags of a rude tower-like look and thatched with grass and vines and bushes. And now and then you have gorges too of a modest pattern as to size, with precipice walls curiously carved and honeycombed by, I don't know what, but water no doubt. The changes are not done yet. For the instant the country finds it is out of Württemberg and into Averia it discards one more thickness of soil to go with previous disrobings and then nothing remains over the bones but the shift. There may be a poorer soil somewhere, but it is not likely. A couple of hours from Beirut you cross into Bohemia and before long you reach this Marienbad and recognize another sharp change, the change from the long ago to today. That is to say from the very old to the spick and span new, from an architecture totally without shapeliness or ornament to an architecture attractively equipped with both, from universal dismalness as to color to universal brightness and beauty of tint, from a town which seems made up of prisons to a town which is made up of gracious and graceful mansions proper to the light of heart and crime-less. It is like jumping out of Jerusalem into Chicago. The more I think of these many changes the more surprising the thing seems. I have never made so picturesque a journey before and surely there cannot be another trip of like length in the world that can furnish so much variety and of so charming and interesting a sort. There are only two or three streets here in this snug pocket in the Hemlock Hills, but they are handsome. When you stand at the foot of a street and look up the slant of it you see only block fronts of graceful pattern with happily broken lines and the pleasing accent of bay projections and balconies in orderly disorder and harmonious confusion and always the color is fresh and cheery, various shades of cream with softly contrasting trimmings of white and now and then a touch of dim red. These blocks are all thick walled, solid, massive, tall. For this is Europe, but it is the brightest and newest looking town on the continent and as pretty as anybody could require. The steep hills spring high aloft from the very back doors and are clothed densely to their tops with hemlocks. In Bavaria everybody is in uniform and you wonder where the private citizens are, but here in Bohemia the uniforms are very rare. Occasionally one catches a glimpse of an Austrian officer but it is only occasionally. Uniforms are so scarce that we seem to be in a republic. Almost the only striking figure is the Polish Jew. He is very frequent. He is tall and of grave countenance and wears a coat that reaches to his ankle bones and he has a little weak curl or two in front of each ear. He has a preposterous look and seems to be as much respected as anybody. The crowds that drift along the promenade at music-time twice a day are fashionably dressed after the Parisian pattern and they look a good deal alike but they speak a lot of languages which you have not encountered before and no ignorant person can spell their names and they can't pronounce them themselves. Marienbad, Mary's bath. The Mary is the Virgin. She is the patroness of these curative springs. They try to cure everything, gout, rheumatism, leanness, fatness, dyspepsia and all the rest. The whole thing is the property of a convent and has been for six hundred or seven hundred years. However, there was never a boom here until a quarter of a century ago. A tough health drill. If a person has the gout, this is what they do with him. They have him out at five-thirty in the morning and give him an egg and let him look at a cup of tea. At six he must be at his particular spring with his tumbler hanging at his belt and he will have plenty of company there. At the first note of the orchestra he must lift his tumbler and begin to sip his dreadful water with the rest. He must sip slowly and be a long time at it. Then he must tramp about the hills for an hour or so and get all the exercise and fresh air possible. Then he takes his tub or wallows in his mud if mud baths are his sort. By noon he has a fine appetite and the rules allow him to turn himself loose now and satisfy it, so long as he is careful and eats only such things as he doesn't want. He puts in the afternoon walking the hills and filling up with fresh air. At night he is allowed to take three ounces of any kind of food he doesn't like and drink one glass of any kind of liquor that he has a prejudice against. He may also smoke one pipe if he isn't used to it. At nine-thirty sharp he must be in bed and his candle out. Repeat the whole thing next day. I don't see any advantage in this over having the gout. In the case of most diseases that is about what one is required to undergo. And if you have any pleasant habit that you value, they want that. They want that the first thing. They make you drop everything that gives an interest to life. Their idea is to reverse your whole system of existence and make a regenerating revolution. If you are a Republican, they make you talk free trade. If you are a Democrat, they make you talk protection. If you are a prohibitionist, you have got to go to bed drunk every night till you get well. They spare nothing. They spare nobody. Reform, reform, that is their whole song. If a person is an orator, they gag him. If he likes to read, they won't let him. If he wants to sing, they make him whistle. They say they can cure any ailment and they do seem to do it. But why should a patient come all the way here? Why shouldn't he do these things at home and save the money? No disease would stay with a person who treated it like that. I didn't come here to take baths. I only came to look around. But first one person and then another began to throw out hints, and pretty soon I was a good deal concerned about myself. One of these gouties here said I had a gouty look about the eye. Next a person who has Qatar of the intestines asked me if I didn't notice the little dim sort of stomach ache when I sneezed. I hadn't before, but I did seem to notice it then. A man that's here for heart disease said he wouldn't come downstairs so fast if he had my build and aspect. A person with an old gold complexion said a man died here in a mud bath last week that had a petrified liver. Good deal, such a looking man as I am. And the same initials. And so on and so on. Of course there was nothing to be uneasy about and I wasn't what you may call really uneasy, but I was not feeling very well, that is, not brisk, and I went to bed. I suppose that that was not a good idea because then they had me. I started in at the upper end of the mill and went through. I am said to be all right now and free from disease, but this does not surprise me. What I have been through in these two weeks would free a person of pretty much everything in him that wasn't nailed there, any loose thing, any unattached fragment of bone, or meat, or morals, or disease, or propensities, or accomplishments, or what not. And I don't say but that I feel well enough. I feel better than I would if I was dead, I reckon. And besides, they say that I am going to build up now and come right along and be all right. I am not saying anything, but I wish I had enough of my diseases back to make me aware of myself and enough of my habits to make it worthwhile to live, to have nothing to matter with you, and no habits is pretty tame, pretty colorless. It is just the way a saint feels, I reckon. It is at least the way he looks. I never could stand a saint. That reminds me that you see very few priests around here, and yet, as I have already said, this whole big enterprise is owned and managed by a convent. The few priests one does see here are dressed like human beings, and so there may be more of them than I imagine. Fifteen priests dressed like these could not attract as much of your attention as would one priest at Aix-les-Bains. You cannot pull your eye loose from the French priests so long as he is in sight. His dress is so fascinatingly ugly. A singular climate. I seem to be wandering from the subject, but I am not. This is about the coldest place I ever saw, and the wettest, too. This August seems like an English November to me. Rain? Why, it seems to like to rain here. It seems to rain every time there is a chance. You are strictly required to be out airing and exercising whenever the sun is shining. So I hate to see the sun shine, because I hate air and exercise. Duty air and duty exercise taken for medicine. It seems ungenuine. Out of season. Degraded to sordid utilities, a subtle spiritual something gone from it, which one can't describe in words, but don't you understand? With that something gone, what is left is but canned air, canned exercise, and you don't want it. When the sun does shine for a few moments or a few hours, these people swarm out and flock through the streets and over the hills and through the pine woods and make the most of the chance. And I have flocked out too on some of those occasions, but as a rule I stay in and try to get warm. And what is therefore means besides heavy clothing and rugs and the polished white tomb that stands lofty and heartless in the corner and thinks it is a stove? Of all the creations of human insanity this thing is the most forbidding. Whether it is heating the room or isn't, the expression is the same, cold indifference. You can't tell which it is doing without going and putting your hand on it. They burn little handfuls of kindling in it, no substantial wood and no coal. The fire burns out every fifteen minutes, and there is no way to tell when this has happened. On these dismal days with the rain steadily falling it is no better company than a corpse. A roaring hickory fire with the cordial flames leaping up the chimney, but I must not think of such things they make a person homesick. This is a most strange place to come to get rid of disease. That is what you think most of the time, but in the intervals when the sun shines and you are tramping the hills and are comparatively warm you get to be neutral, maybe even friendly. I went up to the Auschigstern the other day. This is a tower which stands on the summit of a steep Hemlock mountain here, a tower which there isn't the least use for because the view is as good at the base of it as it is at the top of it. But Germanic people are just mad for views, they never get enough of a view. If they owned Mont Blanc they would build a tower on top of it. The roads up that mountain through that Hemlock forest are hard-packed and smooth, and the grades are easy and comfortable. They are for walkers, not for carriages. You move through deep silence and twilight, and you seem to be in a million-column temple. Whether you look up the hill or down it, you catch glimpses of distant figures flitting without sound, appearing and disappearing in the dim distances among the stems of the trees, and it is all very spectral and solemn and impressive. Now and then the gloom is accented and sized up to your comprehension in a striking way. A ray of sunshine finds its way down through and suddenly calls your attention, for where it falls, far up the hill slope in the brown duskiness, it lays a stripe that has a glare like lightning. The utter stillness of the forest depths, the soundless hush, the total absence of stir or motion of any kind in leaf or branch are things which we have no experience of at home, and consequently no name for in our language. At home there would be the plant of insects and the twittering of birds and vagrant breezes would quiver the foliage. Here it is the stillness of death. This is what the Germans are forever talking about, dreaming about, and despairingly trying to catch and imprison in a poem or a picture or a song. There adored vault unsamkite, loneliness of the woods. But how catch it? It has not a body, it is a spirit. We don't talk about it in America, or dream of it, or sing about it, because we haven't it. Certainly there is something wonderfully alluring about it beguiling, dreamy, unworldly. Where the gloom is softest and richest and the peace and stillness deepest far upon the sides of that hemlock mountain, a spot where Goethe used to sit and dream is marked by a granite obelisk. And on its side is carved this famous poem, which is the master's idea of vault unsamkite. Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruhe. In allen Wipfeln spürst du kaum einen Hauch. Die Vögel ein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, Balde ruest du auch. It is raining again now, however it was doing that before. I have been over to the establishment and had a tub bath with two kinds of pine juice in it. These fill the room with a pungent and most pleasant perfume. They also turn the water to the color of ink and cover it with snowy suds two or three inches deep. The bath is cool, about seventy-five degrees or eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and there is a cooler shower bath after it. While waiting in the reception room all by myself, two men came in and began to talk. Politics, literature, religion? No. They're ailments. There is no other subject here, apparently. Wherever two or three of these people are gathered together, there you have it every time. The first that can get his mouth open contributes his disease and the condition of it, and the others follow with theirs. The two men just referred to were acquaintances and they followed the custom. One of them was built like a gasometer and here to reduce his girth. The other was built like a derrick and is here to fat up as they express it at this resort. They were well satisfied with the progress they were making. The gasometer had lost a quarter of a ton in ten days and showed the record on his belt with pride, and he walked briskly across the room smiling in a vast and luminous way like a harvest moon, and said he couldn't have done that when he arrived here. He buttoned his coat around his equator and showed how loose it was. It was pretty to see his happiness. It was so childlike and honest. He set his feet together and leaned out over his person and proved that he could see them. He said he hadn't seen them from that point before for fifteen years. He had a hand like a boxing glove and on one of his fingers he had just found a diamond ring which he had missed eleven years ago. The minute the derrick got a chance he broke in and began to tell how he was piling on blubber right along three quarters of an ounce every four days and he was still piping away when I was sent for. I left the fat man standing there panting and blowing and swelling and collapsing like a balloon, his next speech already and urgent for delivery. The patients are always at that sort of thing, trying to talk one another to death. The fat ones and the lean ones are nearly the worst at it, but not quite. The dyspeptics are the worst. They are at it all day and all night and all along. They have more symptoms than all the others put together and so there is more variety of experience, more change of condition, more adventure and consequently more play for the imagination, more scope for lying and in every way a bigger field to talk. Go where you will, hide where you may, you cannot escape that word, liver. You overhear it constantly, in the street, in the shop, in the theatre, in the music grounds. Wherever you see two or a dozen people of ordinary bulk talking together you know they are talking about their livers. When you first arrive here your new acquaintances seem sad and hard to talk to, but pretty soon you get the lay of the land and the hand of things and after that you haven't any more trouble. You look into the dreary dull eye and softly say, well, how's your liver? You will see that dim eye flash up with a grateful flame and you will see that jaw begin to work and you will recognize that nothing is required of you from this out but to listen as long as you remain conscious. After a few days you will begin to notice that out of these people's talk a gospel is framing itself and next you will find yourself believing it. It is this, that a man is not what his rearing, his schooling, his beliefs, his principles make him. He is what his liver makes him, that with a healthy liver he will have the clear-seeing eye, the honest heart, the sincere mind, the loving spirit, the loyal soul, the truth and trust and faith that are based as Gibraltar is based and that with an unhealthy liver he must and will have the opposite of all these. He will see nothing as it really is. He cannot trust anybody or believe in anything. His moral foundations are gone from under him. Now isn't that interesting? I think it is. Two days ago, perceiving that there was something unusual the matter with me, I went around from doctor to doctor but without a veil. They said they had never seen this kind of symptoms before, at least not all of them. They had seen some of them but differently arranged. It was a new disease as far as they could see. Apparently it was scruffulous, but of a new kind. That was as much as they felt able to say. Then they made a stethoscopic examination and decided that if anything would dislodge it, a mud-bath was the thing. It was a very ingenious idea. I took the mud-bath and it did dislodge it. Here it is. I ask not, is thy heart still sure, thy love still warm, thy faith secure? I ask not, dreams thou still of me, longst away to fly with me? Ah, no. But as the sun included all the good gifts of the Giver, I sum all those in asking thee, O sweetheart, how is your liver? For if thy liver worketh right, thy faith stands sure, thy hope is bright, their dreams are sweet and I, their God, doubt threats in vain, thou scorned his rod, keep only thy digestion clear, no other foe, my love doth fear. But indigestion hath the power to mar the soul's serenest hour, to crumble at a mantine trust, and turn its certainties to dust, to dim the eye with nameless grief, to chill the heart with unbelief, to banish hope and faith and love, place heaven below and hell above. Then list, details are not to me, so thou'st the sum gift of the Giver. I ask thee all in asking thee, O darling, how is your liver? Yes, it is easy to say, it is scruffulous, but I don't see the signs of it. In my opinion it is as good poetry as I have ever written. Experts say it isn't poetry at all, because it lacks the element of fiction. But that is the voice of envy, I reckon. I call it good medical poetry, and I consider that I am a judge. One of the most curious things in these countries is the street manners of the men and women. In meeting you they come straight on without swerving a hair's breadth from the direct line, and wholly ignoring your right to any part of the road. At the last moment you must yield up your share of it and step aside, or there will be a collision. I noticed this strange barbarism first in Geneva twelve years ago. In Aix-les-Bains, where sidewalks are scarce and everybody walks in the streets, there is plenty of room. But that is no matter. You are always escaping collisions by mere quarter inches. A man or woman who is headed in such a way as to cross your course presently without a collision will actually alter his direction shade by shade and compel a collision, unless at the last instant you jump out of the way. Those folks are not dressed as ladies and gentlemen, and they do not seem to be consciously crowding you out of the road. They seem to be innocently and stupidly unaware that they are doing it. But not so in Geneva. There, this class, especially the men, crowd out men, women, and girls of all rank and raiment consciously and intentionally, crowd them off the sidewalk and into the gutter. There was nothing of this sort in Bayreuth. But here, well, here the thing is astonishing. Collisions are unavoidable unless you do all the yielding yourself. Another odd thing. Here this savagery is confined to the folk who wear the fine clothes. The others are courteous and considerate. A big burly comanche, with all the signs about him of wealth and education, will tranquilly force young ladies to step off into the gutter to avoid being run down by him. It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners. But drowning would help. However, perhaps one can't look for any real, showy amount of delicacy of feeling in a country where a person is brought up to contemplate without a shudder the spectacle of women harnessed up with dogs and hauling carts. The woman is on one side of the pole, the dog on the other, and they bend to the work and tug and pant and strain, and the man tramps leisurely alongside and smokes his pipe. Often the woman is old and grey, and the man is her grandson. The Austrian national ornithological device ought to be replaced by a grandmother harnessed to a slush cart with a dog. This merely in the interest of fact. Heraldic fancy has been a little too much overworked in these countries anyway. Lately one of those curious things happened here which justify the felicitous extravagances of the stage and help us to accept them. A despondent man, bankrupt, friendless and desperate, dropped a dose of strychnia into a bottle of whisky and went out in the dusk to find a handy place for his purpose, which was suicide. In a lonely spot he was stopped by a tramp, who said he would kill him if he didn't give up his money. Instead of jumping at the chance of getting himself killed and thus saving himself the impropriety and annoyance of suicide, he forgot all about his late project and attacked the tramp in a most sturdy and valiant fashion. He made a good fight, but failed to win. The night passed, the morning came, and he woke out of unconsciousness to find that he had been clubbed half to death and left to perish at his leisure. Then he reached for his bottle to add the finishing touch. But it was gone. He pulled himself together and went limping away and presently came upon the tramp, stretched out stone dead, with the empty bottle beside him. He had drunk the whisky and committed suicide innocently. Now, while the man who had been cheated out of his suicide stood there bemoaning his hard luck and wondering how he might manage to raise money enough to buy some more whisky and poison, some people of the neighborhood came by and he told them about his curious adventure. They said that this tramp had been the scourge of the neighborhood and the dread of the constabulary. The inquest passed off quietly and to everyone's satisfaction, and then the people, to testify their gratitude to the hero of the occasion, put him on the police, on a good enough salary, and he is all right now and is not meditating suicide any more. Here are all the elements of the naivest Arabian tale. A man who resists robbery when he hasn't anything to be robbed of does the very best to save his life when he has come out purposely to throw it away. And finally is victorious in defeat, killing his adversary in an effectual and poetic fashion after being already o'er to combat himself. Now, if you let him rise in the service and marry the chief of police's daughter, it has the requisite elements of the Oriental romance lacking not a detail, so far as I can see, end of An Austrian Health Factory by Mark Twain, read by John Greenman with help from Eberhard Schneider, Section 5 of Mark Twain's travel letters from 1891 to 1892. This Libervox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain in the Cradle of Liberty, from the Chicago Sunday Tribune, March 6, 1892, read by John Greenman. It is a good many years since I was in Switzerland last. In that remote time there was only one ladder railway in the country. That state of things has all changed. There isn't a mountain in Switzerland now that hasn't a ladder railroad or two up its back like suspenders. Indeed, some mountains are latticed with them, and two years hence all will be. In that day the peasant of the high altitudes will have to carry a lantern when he goes visiting in the night to keep from stumbling over railroads that have been built since his last round, and also in that day if there shall remain a high altitude peasant whose potato patch hasn't a railroad through it, it will make him as conspicuous as William Tell. However, there are only two best ways to travel through Switzerland. The first best is a float. The second best is by open two-horse carriage. One can come from Lucerne to Interlaken over the Brunich by ladder railroad in an hour or so now, but you can glide smoothly in a carriage in ten, and have two hours for luncheon at noon. For luncheon, not for rest. There is no fatigue connected with the trip. One arrives fresh in spirit and in person in the evening, no fret in his heart, no grime on his face, no grit in his hair, not a cinder in his eye. This is the right condition of mind and body, the right and due preparation for the solemn event which closed the day, stepping with metaphorically uncovered head into the presence of the most impressive mountain mass that the globe can show, the Jungfrau. The stranger's first feeling when suddenly confronted by that towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of snow is breathtaking astonishment. It is as if Heaven's gates had swung open and exposed the throne. It is peaceful here and pleasant at Interlaken. Nothing going on, at least nothing but brilliant life-giving sunshine. There are floods and floods of that. One may properly speak of it as going on, for it is full of the suggestion of activity. The light pours down with energy, with visible enthusiasm. This is a good atmosphere to be in, morally as well as physically. After trying the political atmosphere of the neighbouring monarchies, it is healing and refreshing to breathe in air that has known no taint of slavery for six hundred years, and to come among a people whose political history is great and fine, and worthy to be taught in all schools, and studied by all races and peoples. For the struggle here throughout the centuries has not been in the interest of any private family or any church, but in the interest of the whole body of the nation, and for shelter and protection of all forms of belief. This fact is colossal. If one would realise how colossal it is, and of what dignity and majesty, let him contrast it with the purposes and objects of the Crusades, the Siege of York, the War of the Roses, and other historic comedies of that sword and size. Last week I was beating around the lake of four cantons, and I saw Rutli and Altorf. Rutli is a remote little patch of a meadow, but I do not know how any piece of ground could be holier or better worth crossing oceans and continents to see, since it was there that the great trinity of Switzerland joined hands six centuries ago and swore the oath which set there enslaved and insulted country forever free, and Altorf is also honourable ground and worshipful, since it was there that William, sir named Tell, which interpreted means the foolish talker, that is to say the too-daring talker, refused to bow to Gessler's hat. Of late years the prying student of history has been delighting himself beyond measure over a wonderful find which he has made, to it that Tell did not shoot the apple from his son's head. To hear the students jubilate one would suppose that the question of whether Tell shot the apple or didn't was an important matter, whereas it ranks in importance exactly with the question of whether Washington chopped down the cherry-tree or didn't. The deeds of Washington, the patriot, are the essential thing. The cherry-tree incident is of no consequence. To prove that Tell did shoot the apple from his son's head would merely prove that he had better nerve than most men, and was as skillful with a bow as a million others who proceeded and followed him, but not one wit more so. But Tell was more and better than a mere marksman, more and better than a mere cool head. He was a type. He stands for Swiss patriotism. In his person was represented a whole people. His spirit was their spirit. The spirit which would bow to none but God. The spirit which said this in words and confirmed it with deeds. There have always been Tells in Switzerland, people who would not bow. There was a sufficiency of them at Rotley. There were plenty of them at Milton. Plenty at Grandson. There are plenty to-day. And the first of them all—the very first, earliest banner-bearer of human freedom in this world—was not a man, but a woman—Stalfacher's wife. There she looms, dim and great, through the haze of the centuries, delivering into her husband's ear that gospel of revolt, which was to bear fruit in the conspiracy of Rotley, and the birth of the first free government the world had ever seen. Thursday, September 10th. From this Victoria Hotel one looks straight across a flat of trifling width to a lofty mountain barrier, which has a gateway in it shaped like an inverted pyramid. Beyond this gateway arises the vast bulk of the Jungfrau, a spotless mass of gleaming snow, into the sky. The gateway, in the dark-colored barrier, makes a strong frame for the great picture. The somber frame and the glowing snowpile are startlingly contrasted. It is this frame which concentrates and emphasizes the glory of the Jungfrau and makes it the most engaging and beguiling and fascinating spectacle that exists on the earth. There are many mountains of snow that are as lofty as the Jungfrau and as nobly proportioned, but they lack the frame. They stand at large. They are intruded upon and elbowed by neighboring domes and summits, and their grandeur is diminished and fails of effect. It is a good name, Jungfrau, virgin. Nothing could be whiter, nothing could be purer, nothing could be saintlier of aspect. At six yesterday evening the great intervening barrier seen through a faint bluish haze seemed made of air and substance-less, so soft and rich it was, so shimmering where the wandering lights touched it and so dim where the shadows lay. Apparently it was a dream-stuff, a work of the imagination, nothing real about it. The tint was green, slightly varying shades of it, but mainly very dark. The sun was down, as far as that barrier was concerned, but not for the Jungfrau towering into the heavens beyond the gateway. She was a roaring conflagration of blinding white. It is said that Fridolin, the holy Fridolin, a new saint, but formerly a missionary, gave the mountain its gracious name. He was an Irishman, son of an Irish king. There were thirty thousand kings reigning in County Cork alone in his time, fifteen hundred years ago. It got so that they could not make a living. There was so much competition and wages got cut so. Some of them were out of work months at a time, with wife and little children to feed, and not a crust in the place. At last a particularly severe winter fell upon the country, and hundreds of them were reduced to mendicancy, and were to be seen day after day in the bitterest weather, standing barefoot in the snow, holding out their crowns for alms. Indeed they would have been obliged to emigrate or starve, but for a fortunate idea of Prince Fridolin's, who started a labor union, the first one in history, and got the great bulk of them to join it. He thus won the general gratitude, and they wanted to make him Emperor. Emperor over them all. Emperor of County Cork. But he said no. Walking delegate was good enough for him. For behold he was modest beyond his years, and keen as a whip. To this day in Germany and Switzerland, where St. Fridolin is deeply revered and honoured, the peasantry speak of him affectionately as the first walking delegate. The first walk he took was into France and Germany, missionarying. For missionarying was a better thing in those days than it is in ours. All you had to do was to cure the head savage's sick daughter by a miracle—a miracle like the miracle of lords in our day, for instance—and immediately that head savage was your convert. He was your convert and filled to the eyes with a new convert's enthusiasm. You could sit down and make yourself easy now. He would take the axe and convert the rest of the nation himself. Charlemagne was that kind of a walking delegate. Yes, there were great missionaries in those days, for the methods were sure, and the rewards great. We have no such missionaries now, and no such methods. But to continue the history of the first walking delegate, if you are interested, I am interested myself, because I have seen his relics at Suckingen, and also the very spot where he worked his great miracle, the one which won him his sainthood in the papal court a few centuries later. To have seen these things makes me feel very near to him, almost like a member of the family, in fact. While wandering about the continent, he arrived at the spot on the Rhine, which is now occupied by Suckingen, and proposed to settle there. But the people warned him off. He appealed to the king of the Franks, who made him a present of the whole region, people and all. He built a great cloister there for women, and proceeded to teach in it, and accumulate more land. There were two wealthy brothers in the neighborhood, Urso and Landolf. Urso died, and Friedelin claimed his estates. Landolf asked for documents and papers. Friedelin had none to show. He said the bequest had been made to him by word of mouth. Landolf suggested that he produce a witness, and said it in a way which he thought was very witty, very sarcastic. This shows that he did not know the walking delegate. Friedelin was not disturbed. He said, Appoint your court! I will bring a witness! The court thus created consisted of fifteen counts and barons. A day was appointed for the trial of the case. On that day the judges took their seats in state, and proclamation was made that the court was ready for business. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed, and yet no Friedelin appeared. Landolf rose, and was in the act of claiming judgment by default when a strange clacking sound was heard coming up the stairs. In another moment Friedelin entered at the door, and came walking in a deep hush down the middle aisle, with a tall skeleton stalking in his rear. Amazement and terror sat upon every countenance, for everybody suspected that the skeleton was Ursus. It stopped before the chief judge, and raised its bony arm aloft, and began to speak, while all the assembly shuddered, for they could see the words leak out between its ribs. It said, Brother, why dost thou disturbed my blessed rest, and withhold by robbery the gift which I gave thee for the honour of God? It seems a strange thing, and most irregular. But the verdict was actually given against Landolf on the testimony of this wandering rack heap of unidentified bones. In our day a skeleton would not be allowed to testify at all, for a skeleton has no moral responsibility, and its word could not be rationally trusted. Most skeletons are not to be believed on oath, and this was probably one of them. However, the incident is valuable as preserving to us a curious sample of the quaint laws of evidence of that remote time, a time so remote, so far back toward the beginning of original idiocy, that the difference between a bench of judges, and a basket of vegetables, was as yet so slight, that we may say with all confidence that it didn't really exist. Sunday. During several afternoons I have been engaged in an interesting, maybe useful, piece of work, that is to say I have been trying to make the mighty Jungfrau earn her living, earn it in a most humble sphere, but on a prodigious scale, on a prodigious scale of necessity, for she couldn't do anything in a small way with her size and style. I have been trying to make her do service on a stupendous dial, and check off the hours as they glide along her pallid face up there against the sky, until the time of day to the populations lying within fifty miles of her and to the people in the moon, if they have a good telescope there. Until late in the afternoon the Jungfrau's aspect is that of a spotless desert of snow set upon edge against the sky, but by mid-afternoon some elevations which rise out of the western border of the desert, whose presence you perhaps had not detected or suspected up to that time, begin to cast black shadows eastward across the gleaming surface. At first there is only one shadow, later there are two. Toward four p.m. the other day I was gazing and worshipping as usual, when I chanced to notice that shadow number one was beginning to take itself something of the shape of the human profile. By four the back of the head was good, the military cap was pretty good, the nose was bold and strong, the upper lip sharp, but not pretty, and there was a great goatee that shot straight aggressively forward from the chin. At four thirty the nose had changed its shape considerably and the altered slant of the sun had revealed and made conspicuous a huge buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so located as to answer very well for a shoulder or coat collar to this swarthy and indiscreet sweetheart who had stolen out there right before everybody to pillow his head on the virgin's white breast and whisper soft sentimentalities to her, to the sensuous music of crashing ice domes, and the boom and thunder of the passing avalanche. Music very familiar to his ear, for he has heard it every afternoon at this hour since the day he first came courting this child of the earth, who lives in the sky, and that day is far back, yes. For he was at this pleasant sport before the Middle Ages drifted by him in the valley, before the Romans marched past, and before the antique and recordless barbarians fished and hunted here and wondered who he might be, and were probably afraid of him, and before primeval man himself, just emerged from his forefooted estate, stepped out upon this plain first sample of his race a thousand centuries ago, and cast a glad eye up there, judging he had found a brother human being and consequently something to kill, and before the big Saurians wallowed here still some eons earlier. Oh, yes, a day so far back that the Eternal Son was present to see that first visit. A day so far back that neither tradition nor history was born yet, and a whole weary eternity must come and go before the restless little creature of whose face this dependous shadow face was the prophecy, would arrive in the earth and begin his shabby career and think it a big one. Oh, indeed, yes, when you talk about your poor Roman and Egyptian day before yesterday antiquities, you should choose a time when the hoary shadow face of the Jungfrau is not by. It antidates all antiquities known or imaginable, for it was here the world itself created the theater of future antiquities, and it is the only witness with a human face that was there to see the marvel and remains to us a memorial of it. By four forty p.m. the nose of the shadow is perfect and is beautiful, it is black and is powerfully marked against the upright canvas of glowing snow, and covers hundreds of acres of that resplendent surface. Meantime shadow number two has been creeping out well to the rear of the face west of it, and at five o'clock has assumed a shape that has rather a poor and rude semblance of a shoe. Meantime also the great shadow face has been gradually changing for twenty minutes, and now, five p.m., it is becoming a quite fair portrait of Roscoe Conkling. But likewise is there and is unmistakable. The goatee is shortened, now, and has an end. Formally it hadn't any, but ran off eastward and arrived nowhere. By six p.m. the face has dissolved and gone, and the goatee has become what looks like the shadow of a tower with a pointed roof, and the shoe had turned into what the printers call a fist with a finger pointing. If I were now imprisoned on a mountain some at a hundred miles northward of this point, and was denied a timepiece, I could get along well enough from four till six on clear days, for I could keep trace of the time by the changing shapes of these mighty shadows on the virgin's front, the most dependous dial I am acquainted with, the oldest clock in the world by a couple of million years. I suppose I should not have noticed the forms of the shadows if I hadn't the habit of hunting for faces in the clouds and in mountain crags, a sort of amusement which is very entertaining, even when you don't find any, and brilliantly satisfying when you do. I have searched through several bushels of photographs of the Jungfrau here, but found only one with the face in it, and in this case it was not strictly recognizable as a face, which was evidence that the picture was taken before four in the afternoon, and also evidence that all photographers have persistently overlooked one of the most fascinating features of the Jungfrau show. I say, fascinating, because if you once detect a human face produced on a great plan by unconscious nature, you never get tired of watching it. At first you can't make another person see it at all, but after he has made it out once, he can't see anything else afterward. The King of Greece is a man who goes around quietly enough when off duty. One day this summer he was travelling in an ordinary first-class compartment, just in his other suit, the one which he works the realm in when he is at home, and so he was not looking like anybody in particular, but a good deal like everybody in general. By and by a hearty and healthy German-American got in, and opened up a frank and interesting and sympathetic conversation with him, and asked him a couple of thousand questions about himself, which the King answered good-naturedly, but in a more or less indefinite way as to private particulars. Where do you live when you are at home? In Greece. Greece? Well, now that is just astonishing. Born there? Yes. Do you speak Greek? Yes. Now, ain't that strange? I never expected to live to see that. What is your trade? I mean, how do you get your living? What is your line of business? Well, I hardly know how to answer. I'm only a kind of foreman, on a salary, and the business, well, is a very general kind of business. Yes, I understand general jobbing, a little of everything, anything that there's money in. That's about it, yes. Are you travelling for the house now? Well, partly, but not entirely. Of course, I do a stroke of business if it falls in the way. Good. I like that in you. That's me every time. Go on. I was only going to say I am off on my vacation now. Well, that's all right, no harm in that. A man works all the better for a little let up now and then. Not that I've been used to having it myself, or I haven't. I reckon this is my first. I was born in Germany, and when I was a couple of weeks old, shipped for America, and I've been there ever since, and that's sixty-four years by the watch, I'm an American in principle, and a German at heart, and it's the boss combination. Well, how do you get along as a rule? Pretty fair? I've rather a large family. There, that's it, big family and trying to raise them on a salary. Now, what did you go to do that for? Well, I thought, of course you did. You were young and confident, and thought you could branch out and make things go with the world, and here you are, you see. But never mind about that. I'm not trying to discourage you. Dear me, I've been just where you are myself. You've got good grit. There's good stuff in you. I can see that. You've got a wrong start. That's the whole trouble. But you hold your grip, and we'll see what can be done. Your case ain't half as bad as it might be. You are going to come out all right. I'm bail for that. Boys and girls? My family? Yes. Some of them are boys. And the rest girls? It's just as I expected. But that's all right, and it's better, so anyway. What are the boys doing? Learning a trade? Well, no. I thought it's a great mistake. It's the biggest mistake you ever made. You see that in your own case. A man ought always to have a trade to fall back on. Now, I was a harness-maker at first. Did that prevent me from becoming one of the biggest brewers in America? Oh, no. I always had the harness trick to fall back on in rough weather. Now, if you had learned how to make harness—however, it's too late now—too late, and it's no good plan to cry over spilt milk. But as to the boys, you see, what's to become of them if anything happens to you? It has been my idea to let the eldest one succeed me. Oh, come! Suppose the firm don't want him. I hadn't thought of that, but now look here. You want to get right down to business and stop dreaming. You are capable of immense things, man. You can make a perfect success in life. All you want is somebody to steady you and boost you along on the right road. Do you own anything in the business? No, not exactly. But if I continue to give satisfaction, I suppose I can keep my—keep your place, yes. Well, don't you depend on anything of the kind. They'll bounce you the minute you get a little old and worked out. They'll do it sure. Can't you manage somehow to get into the firm? That's the great thing, you know. I think it is doubtful—very doubtful. That's bad. Yes, and—unfair, too. Do you suppose that if I should go there and have a talk with your people? Look here, do you think you could run a brewery? I have never tried, but I think I could do it after I got a little familiarity with the business. The German was silent for some time. He did a good deal of thinking, and the king waited with curiosity to see what the result was going to be. Finally the German said, My mind's made up. You leave that crowd. You'll never amount to anything there. In these old countries they never give a fellow a show. Yes, you come over to America. Come to my place in Rochester. Bring the family along. You shall have a show in the business and the foremanship, besides. George—you said your name was George. I'll make a man of you. I give you my word. You've never had a chance here, but that's all going to change. Bye, gracious. I'll give you a lift that'll make your hair curl. I feel lost in Berlin. It has no resemblance to the city I had supposed it was. There was once a Berlin which I would have known, from descriptions in books, the Berlin of the last century and the beginning of the present one. A dingy city in a marsh, with rough streets, muddy and lantern-lighted, dividing straight rows of ugly houses all alike, compacted into blocks as square and plain and uniform, and monotonous and serious as so many dry goods boxes. But that Berlin has disappeared. It seems to have disappeared totally and left no sign. The bulk of the Berlin of today has about it no suggestion of a former period. The site it stands on has traditions and a history, but the city itself has no traditions and no history. It is a new city, the newest I have ever seen. Chicago would seem venerable beside it, for there are many old-looking districts in Chicago, but not many in Berlin. The main mass of the city looks as if it had been built last week. The rest of it has a just perceptibly graver tone, and looks as if it might be six or even eight months old. The next feature that strikes one is the spaciousness, the roominess of the city. There is no other city in any country whose streets are generally wide. Berlin is not merely a city of wide streets. It is the city of wide streets. As a wide street city it has never had its equal in any age of the world. Unter den Linden is three streets in one. The Potsdamerstraße is bordered on both sides by sidewalks, which are themselves wider than some of the historic thoroughfares of the old European capitals. There seem to be no lanes or alleys. There are no shortcuts. Here and there, where several important streets are empty into a common center, that center's circumference is of a magnitude calculated to bring that word spaciousness into your mind again. The park in the middle of the city is so huge that it calls up that expression once more. The next feature that strikes one is the straightness of the streets. The short ones haven't so much as a waiver in them. The long ones stretch out to prodigious distances, and then tilt a little to the right or left, then stretch out on another immense reach as straight as a ray of light. A result of this arrangement is that, at night, Berlin is an inspiring site to see. Gas and electric light are employed with a wasteful liberality, and so, wherever one goes, he has always double ranks of brilliant lights stretching far down into the night on every hand, with here and there a wide and splendid constellation of them spread out over an intervening place. And between the interminable double procession of street lamps one has the swarming and darting cab lamps, a lively and pretty addition to the fine spectacle, for they counterfeit the rush and confusion and sparkle of an invasion of fireflies. There is one other noticeable feature, the absolutely level surface of the site of Berlin. Berlin, to recapitulate, is newer to the eye than is any other city, and also blonder of complexion and tidier. No other city has such an air of roominess, freedom from crowding. No other city has so many straight streets, and with Chicago it contests the chromo for flatness of surface, and for phenomenal swiftness of growth. Berlin is the European Chicago. The two cities have about the same population, say a million and a half. I cannot speak in exact terms, because I only know what Chicago's population was week before last, but at that time it was about a million and a half. Fifteen years ago Berlin and Chicago were large cities, of course, but neither of them was the giant it now is. But now the parallels fail. Only parts of Chicago are stately and beautiful, whereas all of Berlin is stately and substantial, and it is not merely in parts, but uniformly beautiful. There are buildings in Chicago that are architecturally finer than any in Berlin, I think, but what I have just said above is still true. These two flat cities would lead the world for phenomenal good health if London were out of the way. As it is, London leads by a point or two. Berlin's death rate is only nineteen in the thousand. Fourteen years ago the rate was a third higher. Berlin is a surprise in a great many ways, in a multitude of ways, to speak strongly and be exact. It seems to be the most governed city in the world, but one must admit that it also seems to be the best governed. Method and system are observable on every hand in great things, in little things, in all details of whatsoever size, and it is not method and system on paper, and there an end. It is method and system in practice, and it has a rule for everything, and puts the rule in force, puts it in force against the poor and powerful alike, without favour or prejudice. It deals with great matters and minute particulars with equal faithfulness, and with applauding and painstaking diligence and persistency, which compel admiration and sometimes regret. There are several taxes, and they are collected quarterly. Collected is the word. They are not merely levied, they are collected every time. This makes light taxes. It is in cities and countries where a considerable part of the community shirk payment the taxes have to be lifted to a burdensome rate. Here the police keep coming calmly and patiently, until you pay your tax. They charge you five or ten cents per visit after the first call. By experiment you will find that they will presently collect that money. In one respect the one million five hundred thousand of Berlin's population are like a family. The head of this large family knows the names of its several members, and where the said members are located, and when and where they were born, and what they do for a living, and what their religious brand is. Whoever comes to Berlin must furnish these particulars to the police immediately. Moreover, if he knows how long he is going to stay, he must say so. If he takes a house he will be taxed on the rent and taxed also on his income. He will not be asked what his income is, and so he may save some lies for home consumption. The police will estimate his income from the house rent he pays, and tax him on that basis. Duties on imported articles are collected with inflexible fidelity, be the some large or little, but the methods are gentle, prompt, and full of the spirit of accommodation. The postman attends to the whole matter for you in cases where the article comes by mail, and you have no trouble and suffer no inconvenience. The other day a friend of mine was informed that there was a package in the post office for him containing a lady's silk belt with gold clasp and a gold chain to hang a bunch of keys on. In his first agitation he was going to try to bribe the postman to chalk it through, but acted upon his sober second thought and allowed the matter to take its proper and regular course. In a little while the postman brought the package and made these several collections. Duty on the silk belt, seven and a half cents. Duty on the gold chain, ten cents. Charge for fetching the package, five cents. These devastating imposts are exacted for the protection of German home industries. The calm, quiet, courteous, cussid persistence of the police is the most admirable thing I have encountered on this side. They undertook to persuade me to send and get a passport for a Swiss maid whom we had brought with us, and at the end of six weeks of patient, tranquil, angelic, daily effort they succeeded. I was not intending to give them trouble, but I was lazy, and I thought they would get tired. Meanwhile they probably thought I would be the one. It turned out just so. One is not allowed to build unstable, unsafe, or unsightly houses in Berlin. The result is this calmly and conspicuously stately city, with its security from conflagrations and breakdowns. It has built of architectural Gibraltas. The building commissioners inspect while the building is going up. It has been found that this is far better than to wait till it falls down. These people are full of whims. One is not allowed to cram poor folk into cramped and dirty tenement houses. Each individual must have just so many cubic feet of room space, and sanitary inspections are systematic and frequent. Everything is orderly. The fire brigade march in rank, curiously uniformed, and so grave is their demeanor that they look like a salvation army under conviction of sin. People tell me that when a fire alarm is sounded, the firemen assemble calmly, answer to their names when the roll is called, then proceed to the fire. There they are ranked up military fashion and told off in detachments by the chief, who parcels out to the detachments the several parts of the work which they are to undertake in putting out that fire. This is all done with low-voiced propriety, and strangers think these people are working a funeral. As a rule the fire is confined to a single floor in these great masses of bricks and masonry, and consequently there is little or no interest attaching to a fire here for the rest of the occupants of the house. There is abundance of newspapers in Berlin, and there was also a newsboy—but he died. At intervals of half a mile on the thoroughfares there are booths, and it is at these that you buy your papers. There are plenty of theatres, but they do not advertise in a loud way. There are no big posters of any kind, and the display of vast type, and of pictures of actors and performance framed on a big scale and done in rainbow colors is a thing unknown. If the big show bills existed there would be no place to exhibit them, for there are no poster fences, and one would not be allowed to disfigure dead walls with them. Unsightly things are forbidden here. Berlin is a rest to the eye. And yet the saunterer can easily find out what is going on at the theatres. All over the city, at short distances apart, there are neat round pillars, eighteen feet high, and about as thick as a hog's head, and on these the little black and white theatre bills and other notices are posted. One generally finds a group round each pillar reading these things. There are plenty of things in Berlin worth importing to America. It is these that I have particularly wished to make a note of. When Buffalo Bill was here, his biggest poster was probably not larger than the top of an ordinary trunk. There is a multiplicity of clean and comfortable horse cars, but whenever you think you know where a car is going to, you would better stop ashore, because that car is not going to that place at all. The car routes are marvelously intricate, and often the drivers get lost and are not heard of for years. The signs on the cars furnish no details as to the course of the journey. They name the end of it, and then experiment around to see how much territory they can cover before they get there. The conductor will collect your fare over again every few miles and give you a ticket which he hasn't apparently kept any record of, and you keep it till an inspector comes aboard by and by and tears a corner off it, which he does not keep. Then you throw the ticket away and get ready to buy another. Brains are of no value when you are trying to navigate Berlin in a horse car. When the ablest of Brooklyn's editors was here on a visit, he took a horse car in the early morning, and wore it out trying to go to a point in the center of the city. He was on board all day and spent many dollars in fares, and then did not arrive at the place which he had started to go to. This is the most thorough way to see Berlin, but it is also the most expensive. But there are excellent features about the car system, nevertheless. The car will not stop for you to get on or off except at certain places, a block or two apart, where there is a sign to indicate that that is a halting station. This system saves many bones. There are twenty places inside the car. When these seats are filled, no more can enter. Four or five persons may stand on each platform, the law decrees the number, and when these standing places are all occupied, the next applicant is refused. As there is no crowding, and as no rowdyism is allowed, women stand on the platforms as well as the men. They often stand there when there are vacant seats inside. For these places are comfortable there being little or no jolting. A native tells me that when the first car was put on, thirty or forty years ago, the public had such a terror of it that they didn't feel safe inside of it or outside either. They made the company keep a man at every crossing with a red flag in his hand. Nobody would travel in the car except convicts on the way to the gallows. This made business in only one direction, and the car had to go back light. To save the company, the city government transferred the convict's cemetery to the other end of the line. This made traffic in both directions and kept the company from going under. This sounds like some of the information which travelling foreigners are furnished with in America. To my mind, it has a doubtful ring about it. The first class cab is neat and trim, and has leather cushion seats and a swift horse. The second class cab is an ugly and lumberly vehicle, and is always old. It seems a strange thing that they have never built any new ones. Still, if such a thing were done, everybody that had time to flock would flock to see it, and that would make a crowd, and the police do not like crowds and disorder here. If there were an earthquake in Berlin, the police would take charge of it, and conduct it in that sort of orderly way that would make you think it was a prayer meeting. That is what an earthquake generally ends in, but this one would be different from those others. It would be kind of soft and self-contained, like a Republican praying for a mugwump. For a course, a quarter of an hour or less, one pays twenty-five cents in a first-class cab and fifteen cents in a second class. The first class will take you along faster, for the second class horse is old, always old, as old as his cab, some authorities say, and ill-fed and weak. He has been a first class once, but has been degraded to second class for long and faithful service. Still, he must take you as far for fifteen cents as the other horse takes you for twenty-five. If you can't do his fifteen-minute distance in fifteen minutes, he must still do the distance for the fifteen cents. Any stranger can check the distance off by means of the most curious map I am acquainted with. It is issued by the city government and can be bought in any shop for a trifle. In it every street is sectioned off like a string of long beads of different colors. Each long bead represents a minute's travel, and when you have covered fifteen of the beads, you have got your money's worth. This map of Berlin is a gay-colored maze, and looks like pictures of the circulation of the blood. The streets are very clean. They are kept so, not by prayer and talk and the other New York methods, but by daily and hourly work with scrapers and brooms, and when an asphalted street has been tidally scraped after a rain or a light snowfall, they scatter clean sand over it. This saves some of the horses from falling down. In fact, this is a city government which seems to stop at no expense where the public convenience, comfort, and health are concerned, except in one detail. That is the naming of the streets and the numbering of the houses. Sometimes the name of a street will change in the middle of a block. You will not find it out till you get to the next corner and discover the new name on the wall, and of course you don't know just when the change happened. The names are plainly marked on the corners, on all the corners. There are no exceptions. But the numbering of the houses, there has never been anything like it since original chaos. It is not possible that it was done by this wise city government. At first one thinks it was done by an idiot. But there is too much variety about it for that. An idiot could not think of so many different ways of making confusion and propagating blasphemy. The numbers run up one side of the street and down the other. That is indurable, but the rest isn't. They often use one number for three or four houses, and sometimes they put the number on only one of the houses and let you guess at the others. Sometimes they put a number on a house, four, for instance, then put four A, four B, four C, on the succeeding houses. And one becomes old and decrepit before he finally arrives at five. A result of this systemless system is that when you are at number one in a street, you haven't any idea how far it may be to number one hundred and fifty. It may be only six or eight blocks. It may be a couple of miles. Frederick Street is long and is one of the great thoroughfares. The other day a man put his money behind the assertion that there were more refreshment places in that street than numbers on the houses, and he won. There were two hundred and fifty-four numbers and two hundred and fifty-seven refreshment places. Yet, as I have said, it is a long street. But the worst feature of all this complex business is that in Berlin the numbers do not travel in any one direction. No, they travel along until they get to fifty or sixty, perhaps. Then suddenly you find yourself up in the hundreds. A hundred and forty, maybe. The next will be one hundred and thirty-nine. Then you perceive by that sign that the numbers are now traveling toward you from the opposite direction. They will keep that sort of insanity up as long as you travel that street. Every now and then the numbers will turn and run the other way. As a rule there is an arrow under the number to show by the direction of its flight which way the numbers are proceeding. There are a good many suicides in Berlin, I have seen six reported in one day. There is always a deal of learned and laborious arguing and ciphering going on as to the cause of this state of things. If they will set to work and number their houses in a rational way perhaps they will find out what was the matter. More than a month ago Berlin began to prepare to celebrate Professor Bircha's seventieth birthday. When the birthday arrived, the middle of October, it seemed to me that all the world of science arrived with it. Deputation after deputation came bringing the homage and reverence of far cities and centers of learning, and during the whole of a long day the hero of it sat and received such witness of his greatness as has seldom been vouchsafe to any man in any walk of life in any time, ancient or modern. These demonstrations were continued in one form or another, day after day, and were presently merged in similar demonstrations to his twin in science and achievement, Professor Helmholtz, whose seventieth birthday is separated from Bircha's, by only about three weeks, so nearly as this did these two extraordinary men come to being born together. Two such births have seldom signalized a single year in human history. But perhaps the final and closing demonstration was peculiarly grateful to them. This was a comers, given in their honor the other night by one thousand students. It was held in a huge hall, very long and very lofty, which had five galleries far above everybody's head, which were crowded with ladies, four hundred or five hundred, I judged. It was beautifully decorated with clustered flags and various ornamental devices, and was brilliantly lighted. On the spacious floor of this place were ranged in files innumerable tables, seating twenty-four persons each, extending from one end of the great hall clear to the other, and with narrow aisles between the files. In the center, on one side, was a high and tastefully decorated platform, twenty or thirty feet long, with a long table on it, behind which sat the half-dozen chiefs of the choir of the comers, in the rich, medieval costumes of as many different college corps. Behind these youths a band of musicians was concealed. On the floor directly in front of this platform were half a dozen tables which were distinguished from the outlying continent of tables, by being covered instead of left naked. Of these the central table was reserved for the two heroes of the occasion, and twenty particularly eminent professors of the Berlin University, and the other covered tables were for the occupancy of a hundred less distinguished professors. I was glad to be honoured with a place at the table of the two heroes of the occasion, although I was not really learned enough to deserve it. Indeed, there was a pleasant strangeness in being in such company, to be thus associated with twenty-three men who forget more every day than I ever knew. Yet there was nothing embarrassing about it, because loaded men and empty ones look about alike. I knew that to that multitude there I was a professor. It required but little art to catch the ways and attitude of those men and imitate them, and I had no difficulty in looking as much like a professor as anybody there. We arrived early, so early that only Professors Wirkau and Helmholtz and a dozen guests of the special tables were ahead of us, and three hundred or four hundred students. But people were arriving in floods now, and within fifteen minutes all but the special tables were occupied, and the great house was crammed. The aisles included. It was said that there were four thousand men present. It was the most animated scene. There is no doubt about that. It was a stupendous beehive. At each end of each table stood a core student in the uniform of his core. These quaint costumes are of brilliant coloured silks and velvets, with sometimes a high plumed hat, sometimes a broad scotch cap, with a great plume wound about it sometimes, oftenest, a little shallow silk cap on the tip of the crown, like an inverted saucer. And sometimes the pantaloons are snow-white, sometimes of other colours. The boots in all cases come up well above the knee, and in all cases also white gauntlets are worn. The sword is a rapier with a bowl-shaped guard for the hand, painted in several colours. Each core has a uniform of its own, and all are of rich material, brilliant in colour, and exceedingly picturesque. For they are survivals of the vanished costumes of the Middle Ages, and they reproduce for us the time when men were beautiful to look at. The student who stood guard at our end of the table was of grave countenance and great frame and grace of form, and he was doubtless and accurate reproduction, clothes and all, of some ancestor of his of two or three centuries ago. A reproduction, as far as the outside, the animal man goes, I mean. As I say, the place was now crowded. The nearest aisle was packed with students standing up, and they made a fence which shut off the rest of the house from view. As far down this fence as you could see all these wholesome young faces were turned in one direction. All these intent and worshipping eyes were centred upon one spot, the place where Virchow and Helmholtz sat. The boys seemed lost to everything unconscious of their own existence. They devoured these two intellectual giants with their eyes. They feasted upon them, and the worship that was in their hearts shone in their faces. It seemed to me that I would rather be flooded with a glory like that, instinct with sincerity innocent of self-seeking, than win a hundred battles and break a million hearts. There was a big mug of beer in front of each of us, and more to come when wanted. There was also a quarto pamphlet containing the words of the songs to be sung. After the names of the officers of the feast were these words in large type. I was not able to translate this to my satisfaction, but a professor helped me out. This was his explanation. The students in uniform belonged to different college corps. Not all students belonged to the corps. None joined the corps except those who enjoy fighting. The corps students fight duels with swords every week. One corps challenging another corps to furnish a certain number of dualists for the occasion, and it is only on this battlefield that students of different corps exchange courtesies. In common life they do not drink with each other or speak. The above line now translates itself. There is truce during the commerce. War is late aside, and fellowship takes its place. Now the performance began. The concealed band played a piece of martial music. Then there was a pause. The students on the platform rose to their feet. The middle one gave a toast to the emperor. Then all the house rose, mugs in hand. At the call one, two, three, all glasses were drained, and then brought down with a slam on the tables in unison. The result was as good an imitation of thunder as I have ever heard. From now on during an hour there was singing in mighty chorus. During each interval between songs a number of the special guests, the professors, arrived. There seemed to be some signal whereby the students on the platform were made aware that a professor had arrived at the remote door of entrance. For you would see them suddenly rise to their feet, strike an erect military attitude, then draw their swords. The swords of all their brethren standing guard at the innumerable tables would flash from their scabbards and be held aloft. A handsome spectacle. Three clear bugle notes would ring out. Then all these swords would come down with a crash twice repeated on the tables and be uplifted and held aloft again. Then in the distance you would see the gay uniforms and uplifted swords of a guard of honour clearing the way and conducting the guests down to his place. The songs were stirring, the immense outpour from young life and young lungs, the crash of swords, and the thunder of the beer mugs gradually worked a body up to what seemed the last possible summit of excitement. It surely seemed to me that I had reached that summit, that I had reached my limit, and that there was no higher lift desirable for me. When apparently the last eminent guest had long ago taken his place, again those three bugle blasts rang out and once more the swords leapt from their scabbards. Who might this latecomer be? Nobody was interested to inquire. Still, indolent eyes were turned toward the distant entrance. We saw the silken gleam and the lifted swords of a guard of honour plowing through the remote crowds. Then we saw that end of the house rising to its feet. Saw it rise, abreast, the advancing guard all along, like a wave. This supreme honour had been offered to no one before. Then there was an excited whisper at our table. Monson! And the whole house rose. Rose and shouted and stamped and clapped and banged the beer mugs. Just simply a storm. Then the little man with his long hair and emersonian face edged his way past us and took his seat. I could have touched him with my hand. Monson, think of it. This was one of those immense surprises that can happen only a few times in one's life. I was not dreaming of him. He was to me only a giant myth, a world shadowing specter, not a reality. The surprise of it all can be only comparable to a man suddenly coming upon Mont Blanc with its awful form towering into the sky, when he didn't suspect he was in its neighborhood. I would have walked a great many miles to get a sight of him. And here he was. Without trouble or tramp or cost of any kind. Here he was closed in a titanic deceptive modesty, which made him look like other men. Here he was, carrying the Roman world and all the Caesars in his hospitable skull, and doing it as easily as that other luminous vault the skull of the universe carries the milky way and the constellations. One of the professors said that once upon a time an American young lady was introduced to Monson and found herself badly scared and speechless. She dreaded to see his mouth unclose, for she was expecting him to choose a subject several miles above her comprehension, and didn't suppose he could get down to the world that other people lived in. But, when his remark came, her terrors disappeared. Bury, how do you do? Have you read Howell's last book? I think it's his best. The active ceremonies of the evening closed with the speeches of welcome delivered by two students and the replies made by Professors Virchow and Helmholtz. Virchow has long been a member of the city government in Berlin. He works as hard for the city as does any other Berlin alderman, and gets the same pay. Nothing. I don't know that we in America could venture to ask our most illustrious citizen to serve in a board of alderman, and if we might venture it, I am not positively sure that we could elect him. But here, the municipal system is such that the best men in the city consider it an honour to serve gratis as alderman, and the people have the good sense to prefer these men and to elect them year after year. As a result, Berlin is a thoroughly well-governed city. It is a free city. Its affairs are not meddled with by the state. They are managed by its own citizens, and after methods of their own devising. End of The Chicago of Europe by Mark Twain and End of Mark Twain's Travel Letters from 1891 to 1892, read by John Greenman with help from Eberhard Schneider.