at the voice of the Herberges-Vater (the father
of the Herberge), and quake like timid mice beneath the eye of the
police.

CHAPTER X.

A STREET IN BERLIN.

Berlin is a fine city, let the wise Germans of the East say what they
will. It may be deficient in those monumental records of "the good old
times," the crumbling church, the thick-walled tower, the halls and
dungeons of feudal barbarism, but it abounds with evidences of the vigour
and life of modern taste and skill; and instead of daily sinking into
rotten significance, like some of its elder brethren, is hourly growing
in beauty and strength. It has all the attributes of a great
city--spacious "places," handsome edifices, broad and well-paved streets.
Its monuments, while they are evidences of great cultivation in the arts,
tell of times and events just old enough to be beyond the ken of our own
experiences, yet possess all the truth and vividness of recent history.
"Der Alter Fritz," Blucher, Zieten, Seyditz, Winterfeldt, Keith, and "Der
Alter Dessauer"--what names are these in Prussian story!

The entrance into Berlin, on the western side, from Spandau, by the
Brandenburger Gate, is the finest that the capital of Prussia has to
present. A thickly-planted wood skirts the road for a mile or two before
you reach the city. The trees are dwarfed and twisted, for they cannot
grow freely in the dense, eternal sands of this part of North Germany,
but they form a rough fringing to the white road; while the noble gate
itself, built of massive stone in the Doric order of architecture, and
surmounted by an effective group of a four-horse chariot, within which
stands the figure of Victory raising the Roman eagle above the almost
winged steeds, might grace the entrance to the city of the Caesars.

This Brandenburger Thor, as it is called, is a copy of the Propylaea of
the Acropolis of Athens, but built on a much grander scale. The central
gate is of iron, eighteen feet high; of the fourteen land gates of Berlin
it is immeasurably the finest, and it acquires a still deeper interest
when some enthusiastic Berliner, pointing to the prancing steeds upon the
summit of the arch, tells you how Napoleon in his admiration had ordered
this self-same group to be transported to Paris in 1807, to ornament a
French "_arch de triomphe_," and how "We, the Prussians," had torn the
spoil from the eagle's very nest in 1814, to replant it on its original
site. A glow of milit