e glass balls and artificial fountains in its garden. It is often a
villa in appearance and several flats in reality. Its most pleasant
feature is the garden-room or big verandah, where in summer all meals
are served. Outside Hamburg, on the banks of the Elbe, the merchant
princes of the city have built themselves palaces surrounded by
splendid park-like gardens. But Hamburg, though it does not love the
English, is always accused by the rest of Germany of being English. It
certainly has beautiful gardens. So have other German cities in some
instances, but well kept gardens are not the matter of course in
Germany that they are here. You see more bare and artificial ones and
more neglected overgrown ones in an afternoon's walk than you do all
the year round in England. But I wish we could follow the German
fashion of planting all our streets with double avenues of healthy
trees. Berlin in spring seems to be set in a wood; it is so fresh and
green. The flowering shrubs, on the other hand, are not to be compared
with ours. Everyone rushes to see a few lilac bushes, and Gueldres
roses trimmed to a stiff snowball of flowers, and everyone says _Wie
Herrlich!_ but you miss the profusion of lilac, hawthorn, and laburnum
that runs riot all about London in every residential road and every
garden. Above all, you miss the English lawns. In Berlin wherever
grass is grown it looks either thin or coarse. The majority of Germans
do not dream of wanting a garden. They are content with a few palms in
their sitting-room or window boxes on their balcony. They are proud of
their window-gardening in Berlin, but I think London windows in June
are gayer and more flowery. The palms kept in German rooms attain to a
great size and number, and a palm is a favourite present. Nursery
gardeners undertake the troublesome business of repotting them every
spring, so the owners have nothing to do but water them and keep them
from draughts. There are usually so many windows in a German
sitting-room that those near the plants need never be opened in
winter; and even when the temperature sinks several degrees below zero
outside, the air of the flat is kept artificially warm, so warm that
English folk gasp and flag in it. At the first sign of winter the
outside windows, removed for the summer, are brought back again. Our
windows are unknown on the continent, and disliked by continentals who
see them here. They call them guillotine windows, and consider them
da