At stations remote from one
another, German voices shout German names; I do not recognize them by
the sound, and look for them in vain upon the map. Magnificent great
station buildings are shown up by gaslight in the midst of surrounding
darkness, then disappear. We pass Hanover and Minden; the train keeps on
its way; and morning dawns.

On either side stretched a peat-moss, upon which the mist was producing
a singular mirage. We seemed to be upon a causeway traversing an immense
lake whose waves crept up gently, dying in transparent folds along the
edge of the embankment. Here and there a group of trees or a cottage,
emerging like an island, completed the illusion, for such it was. A
sheet of bluish mist, floating a little above the ground and curling up
along its upper surface under the rays of the sun, caused this aqueous
phantasmagoria, resembling the Fata Morgana of Sicily. In vain did my
geographical knowledge protest, disconcerted, against this inland sea,
which no map of Prussia indicates; my eyes would not give it up, and
later in the day, when the sun, rising higher, had dried up this
imaginary lake, they required the presence of a boat to make them admit
that any body of water could be real.

Suddenly upon the left were massed the trees of a great park; Tritons
and Nereids appeared, dabbling in the basin of a fountain; there was a
dome and a circle of columns rising above extensive buildings; and this
was Potsdam....

A few moments later we were in Berlin, and a fiacre set me down at the
hotel. One of the keenest pleasures of a traveler is that first drive
through a hitherto unknown city, destroying or confirming his
preconceived idea of it. All that is peculiar and characteristic seizes
upon the yet virgin eye, whose perceptive power is never more clear.

My idea of Berlin had been drawn in great measure from Hoffman's
fantastic stories. In spite of myself, a Berlin, strange and grotesque,
peopled with Aulic councillors, sandmen, Kreislers, archivist Lindursts,
and student Anselms, had reared itself within my brain, amid a fog of
tobacco-smoke; and there before me was a city regularly built, stately,
with wide streets, extensive public grounds, and imposing edifices of a
style half-English, half-German, and modern to the last degree.

As we drove along I glanced down into those cellars, with steps so
polished, so slippery, so well-soaped, that one might slide in as into
the den of an ant-lion--to see i