plomatic Corps. A drizzling rain set
in suddenly in the afternoon, sending dismay to the hearts of all; for
the most brilliant part of the celebration was still in reserve for
the evening. The rain fell in occasional light showers up to a late
hour, but it dampened only the outer garb, not the hearts, of the
undiminished multitude, which at night-fall, on foot or in carriages,
thronged the streets of the brilliant capital, whose myriad lights
showed to better advantage under the reflecting clouds than they would
have done under starlight. The carriages numbered scores of thousands,
and the people on foot hundreds of thousands; but so complete were the
arrangements of the police and so obedient the concourse, that all
proceeded in nearly perfect order. Our coachman fortunately drove
through Old Berlin and Koeln, as a preliminary to the evening's
sight-seeing. Long arcades filled with Jews' shops were worthy the pen
of Dickens. This festal day made this most ancient portion of the city
also one of the most picturesque. Houses with quaint dormer windows
roofed by "eyelids," of an architecture dating back two or three
hundred years, gleamed with candles in every window. Almost no house
or shop was so poor as to dispense with its share of the universal
illumination. At least three horizontal lines of lighted candles
threaded both sides of every street of this city of a million and a
half inhabitants. Many private as well as public buildings in the old
part showed by colored lights the picturesque, quaint streets and
nooks, as no light of day can ever do. We were passing the Rath-haus,
or City Hall,--a modern and imposing edifice,--at the time when its
great tower was being lighted up. Three hundred feet above the
pavement floated the flags grouped in the centre and at the corners of
the square tower. Invisible red fires illuminated them, the shafts of
crimson light rising to the clouds above, the outlines of the
remainder of the building dimly reposing in darkness. An immense
electric light, guided by a reflector in another tower, shot a bridge
of white light high in air across the river, and fell, like a
circumscribed space of noonday amid black darkness, on the fine
equestrian statue of the Great Elector by the bridge behind the Old
Castle, with an effect almost indescribable. As we entered Unter den
Linden by the Lustgarten, the beautiful square and its historic
edifices, which form an ideal sight even by daylight, glowed