fragrances. But, though I have attended many a table and given audience
to many an attendant perfume, nowhere, nor never, has there been borne
in upon me the like of that exquisite nasal blend of _bratens_ and
_braeus_ with which the twilight breezes have christened me among the
trees of the Grunewald. Forgotten, there, are the roses on the moonlit
garden wall in Barbizon, chaperoned by the fairy forest of
Fontainebleau; forgotten the damp wild clover fields of the Indiana of
my boyhood. All vanished, gone, before the olfactory transports of this
concert of hops and schnitzels, of Rhineland vineyards and upland
_kaese_. And here it is, here in the great German out-of-doors, on the
border of the Hundekehlen lake, with a nimble _kellner_ at my elbow,
with the plain, homely German people to the right and left of me, with
the stars beginning to silver in the silent water, with the band lifting
me, a drab and absurd American, into the spirit of this kaiserwelt, and
with the innocent eyes of the fair fraeulein under yonder tree
intermittently englishing their coquettish glances from the
_eisschokolade_ that should alone engage them--here it is that I like
best to bide the climbing of the moon into the skies over Berlin--here
it is that I like best to wait upon the city's night.

Ah, Berlin, how little the world knows you--you and your children! It
sees you fat of figure, an Adam's apple struggling with your every
vowel, ponderous of temperament. It sees you a sullen and varicose
mistress, whose draperies hang heavy and ludicrous from a pudgy form. It
sees you a portly, pursy, foolish Undine struggling awkwardly from out a
cyclopean vat of beer. It hears your music in the ta-tata-tata-ta-ta of
your "_Ach, du lieber Augustin_" alone; the sum of your sentiment in
your "_Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten_." Wise American
journalists, commissioned to explore your soul, have returned
characteristically to announce that you "In your German way" (_American
synonyms: elephantine, phlegmatic, stodgy, clumsy, sluggish_) seek
desperately to appropriate, in ferocious lech to be metropolitan, the
"spirit of Paris" (_American synonyms: silk stockings, "wine," Maxim's,
jevousaime, Rat Mort_). Announce they also your "mechanical" pleasures,
your weighty light-heartedness, your stolid, stoic essay to take unto
yourself, still in tigerish itch to be cosmopolitan, the
frou-frouishness of the flirting capital over the frontier. Wise old
phil