50 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



from the looks of the picture, a pleasant, roomy, attractive 

 place, and yet it is in the busiest part of the city of Berlin, and 

 in front of the building there pass two hundred thousand people 

 a day. Now that is a gcod deal of traffic to pass along one 

 street. There is some business going on there. Tt shows, how- 

 ever, from our point of view that a little open space in a city 

 with a tree or two and a strip of grass are well worth while. 



Another public building which is siomewhat unique is a public 

 theatre. I believe there are two in the United States. One of 

 them is in the neighboring town of Northampton which owns its 

 own theatre and controls it and manages it in the interest of 

 the public. These public theatres are common in Germany. 

 Performances are given frequently. This is one of the least 

 of them in a country town — a very attractive public building. 

 And this is a post office. Of all the public buildings the one 

 which comes nearest to the average man is the post office. This 

 is one of the thirty-six post offices in Berlin. This is one in 

 one of the small suburbs, where I used to live and used to go 

 frequently to mail packages. It is interesting to me on a great 

 many accounts. That looks like a good deal of a building — 

 we see only one end of it here — and to imagine that there are 

 thirty-six of them in Berlin would indicate that they put a good 

 deal of money into public buildings. But their post office 

 department does some business. It handles all the telephone 

 business — not very well ; it handles all the telegraphic business, 

 most admirably, and it handles all the stuff which in this coun- 

 try we call the express business but which over there is the 

 parcels post, — a real, genuine, honest parcels post. It used to 

 be interesting to me to go over and see all those packages of 

 every sort of thing, butter, sausage, live geese and one thing 

 and another, coming in there to be mailed. Why, if a man 

 has a yellow dog he wants to get rid of, what he does is to take 

 it down there, write an address on a taac. tie it on the dog's 

 tail, address it to some one, put a stamp on the dog's back and 

 send it along. I had some experiences with this parcels post 

 which interested me. I collected some apples to send to my 

 friend Professor Sears, in Amherst, and I had them packed in 

 a box weighing four or five pounds which I knew could not 

 have got into the mails in the United States unless it was in- 

 serted from the ciitside. It was not mailable here, but it had 



