fringe of suburbs,
and then they were in one of those vast Continental stations which put
our outdated depots to shame. The good 'traeger' who took possession of
them and their hand-bags, put their boxes on a baggage-bearing drosky,
and then got them another drosky for their personal transportation. This
was a drosky of the first-class, but they would not have thought it so,
either from the vehicle itself, or from the appearance of the driver and
his horses. The public carriages of Germany are the shabbiest in the
world; at Berlin the horses look like old hair trunks and the drivers
like their moth-eaten contents.

The Marches got no splendor for the two prices they paid, and their
approach to their hotel on Unter den Linden was as unimpressive as the
ignoble avenue itself. It was a moist, cold evening, and the mean,
tiresome street, slopped and splashed under its two rows of small trees,
to which the thinning leaves clung like wet rags, between long lines of
shops and hotels which had neither the grace of Paris nor the grandiosity
of New York. March quoted in bitter derision:

"Bees, bees, was it your hydromel,
Under the Lindens?"

and his wife said that if Commonwealth Avenue in Boston could be imagined
with its trees and without their beauty, flanked by the architecture of
Sixth Avenue, with dashes of the west side of Union Square, that would be
the famous Unter den Linden, where she had so resolutely decided that
they would stay while in Berlin.

They had agreed upon the hotel, and neither could blame the other because
it proved second-rate in everything but its charges. They ate a poorish
table d'hote dinner in such low spirits that March had no heart to get a
rise from his wife by calling her notice to the mouse which fed upon the
crumbs about their feet while they dined. Their English-speaking waiter
said that it was a very warm evening, and they never knew whether this
was because he was a humorist, or because he was lonely and wished to
talk, or because it really was a warm evening, for Berlin. When they had
finished, they went out and drove about the greater part of the evening
looking for another hotel, whose first requisite should be that it was
not on Unter den Linden. What mainly determined Mrs. March in favor of
the large, handsome, impersonal place they fixed upon was the fact that
it was equipped for steam-heating; what determined March was the fact
that it had a passenger-office where whe