ar it ran out in thirty hours and there were riots from
the Max-Joseph-Platz to the Isar. But last May day there was enough and
to spare--enough, at all events, to last until the Virginian and I gave
up, at high noon of May 3. The Virginian went to bed at the Bayerischer
Hof at 12:30, leaving a call for 4 P.M. of May 5.

Ah, the Hofbraeuhaus! A massive and majestic shrine, the Parthenon of
beer drinking, seductive to virtuosi, fascinating to the connoisseur,
but a bit too strenuous, a trifle too cruel, perhaps, for the
dilettante. The Muencheners love it as hillmen love the hills. There
every one of them returns, soon or late. There he takes his children, to
teach them his hereditary art. There he takes his old grandfather, to
say farewell to the world. There, when he has passed out himself, his
pallbearers in their gauds of grief will stop to refresh themselves, and
to praise him in speech and song, and to weep unashamed for the loss of
so _gemuethlich_ a fellow.

But, as I have said, the Hofbraeuhaus is no playroom for amateurs. My
advice to you, if you would sip the cream of Munich and leave the hot
acids and lye, is that you have yourself hauled forthwith to the
Hoftheatre Cafe, and that you there tackle a modest seidel of
Spatenbraeu--first one, and then another, and so on until you master the
science.

And all that I ask in payment for that tip--the most valuable,
perhaps, you have ever got from a book--is that you make polite inquiry
of the Herr Wirt regarding Fraeulein Sophie, and that you present to her,
when she comes tripping to your table, the respects and compliments of
one who forgets not her cerulean eyes, her swanlike glide, her Mona Lisa
smile and her leucemic and superbly manicured hands!

BERLIN

[Illustration: BERLIN]

BERLIN

I am back again, back again in New York. My rooms are littered with
battered bags and down-at-the-heel walking sticks and still-damp
steamer rugs, lying where they dropped from the hands of maudlin
bellboys. My trunks are creaking their way down the hall, urged on by
a perspiring, muttering porter. The windows, still locked and gone
blue-grey with the August heat, rattle to the echo of the "L" trains a
block away, trains rankling up to Harlem with a sweating, struggling
people, the people of the Republic, their day's grind over, jamming
their one way to a thousand flat houses, there to await, in an all
unconscious poverty, the sunrise of still such anothe