am, "the true
cradle of the Prussian army," as Baedeker, deviating for an instant
into metaphor, describes it, but simply in Sans Souci. He is now no
longer in the twentieth century, but the eighteenth--one hundred and
fifty years ago or more--in Frederick's day, the period of pigtails,
of giant grenadiers in the old-time blue and red coats, the high and
fantastic shako made of metal and tapering to a point, of
three-cornered hats resting on powdered wigs, of yellow top-boots, and
exhaling the general air of ruffianly geniality characteristic of the
manners and soldiers of the age.

As our foreigner advances through the park, where, as he is told, the
Emperor makes a promenade each Christmas Eve distributing ten-mark
pieces (spiteful chroniclers make it three marks) to all and sundry
poor, he will notice the fountain "the water of which rises to a
height of 130 feet," with its twelve figures by French artists of the
eighteenth century, and ascend the broad terraced flight of marble
steps up which the present Crown Prince is credited with once urging
his trembling steed--leading to the Mecca of his imagination, the
palace Sans Souci itself. The building is only one story high, not
large, reminding one somewhat of the Trianon at Versailles, though
lacking the Trianon's finished lightness and elegance, yet with its
semicircular colonnade distinctly French, and impressive by its
elevated situation. The chief, the enduring, the magical impression,
however, begins to form as our foreigner commences his pilgrimage
through the rooms in which Frederick passed most of his later years.
As he pauses in the Voltaire Chamber he imagines the two great
figures, seated in stiff-backed chairs at a little table on which
stand, perhaps, a pair of cut Venetian wine-glasses and a tall bottle
of old Rheinish--the great man of thought and the great man of action,
the two great atheists and freethinkers of Europe, with their earnest,
sharply featured faces, and their wigs bobbing at each other,
discussing the events and tendencies of their time. And how they must
have talked--no wonder Frederick, though the idol of his subjects,
withdrew for such discourse from the society of the day, with its
twaddle of the tea-cups and its parade-ground platitudes.

As in our own time, there was then no lack of stimulating topics. The
influence of the old Catholicism and the old feudalism was rapidly
diminishing, the night of superstition was passing, and t