rd, or
_Schlaeger_, was as necessary as pipe or beer-mug; not a slender
fencing-foil, with a button on the point, and slight enough to snap
with a vigorous thrust, but a stout blade of tempered steel, ground
sharp. With these weapons the students perpetrated savageries,
almost unrebuked, which struck an American with horror. Duels were
of frequent occurrence, taking place sometimes at places and on days
regularly set apart for the really bloody work. The fighters were
partially protected by a sort of armour, and the wounds inflicted were
generally more ghastly than dangerous; though a son of Bismarck was
said to have been nearly killed at Bonn a few years before, and there
was sometimes serious maiming. Perhaps one may say it was nothing but
very rough play, but it was the play of young savages, whose sport was
nothing to them without a dash of cruel rage. The practice dates from
the time when the Germans wore wolf-skins, and were barbarians roaring
in their woods. Perhaps the university authorities found it too
inveterate a thing to be done away with; perhaps, too, they felt,
thinking as it were under their spiked helmets, that after all it had
a value, making the young men cool in danger and accustoming them to
weapons. We, after all, cannot say too much. Often our young American
students in Germany take to the _Schlaeger_ as gracefully and
naturally as game-cocks to spurs. The most noted duellist at one of
the universities that winter was a burly young Westerner, who had
things at first all his own way. A still burlier Prussian from
Tuebingen, however, appeared at last, and so carved our valiant
borderer's face, that thereafter with its criss-cross scars it looked
like a well-frequented skating-ground. Football, too, in America
probably kills and maims more in a year than all the German duels.

To crown all, the schools and University at Berlin were magnificently
supplemented in the great Museum, a vast collection, where one might
study the rise and progress of civilisation in every race of past ages
that has had a history, the present condition of perhaps every people,
civilised or wild, under the sun. In one great hall you were among the
satin garments and lacquered furniture of China; in another there was
the seal-skin work of the Esquimaux stitched with sinew. Now you sat
in a Tartar tent, now among the war-clubs, the conch-shell trumpets,
the drums covered with human skin of the Polynesians. Here it was
the fea