INTRODUCTION xi 



scarred with the beginnings of the baroque mag- 

 nificence that now stretches to Charlottenburg and 

 Potsdam. Other impressions I remember came from 

 the revolting simplicity of the sanitary accommoda- 

 tion, although we had fine rooms on the first floor 

 of a house a few yards from the Pariser Platz; the 

 swift silence that fell a few minutes after midnight, 

 the Cafe Bauer alone flaunting through the night ; 

 the great rush of business people pouring into the 

 streets at midday, and all Berlin, in denser throngs 

 than I had seen or imagined, filling the open places 

 in the evenings and on Sundays. Two things only 

 gave me the shock of feeling that I was an alien in 

 an alien country. We had treated the police-slips 

 presented to us by the landlady, I suppose, in a 

 casual way, and we must have got at cross-purposes 

 with the inspector who promptly paid us a visit, for 

 we entirely failed to convince him of the exact truth, 

 that we had no business of any kind in Berlin. We 

 were neither students nor in commerce ; we didn't 

 know why we had come to Berlin, and we had no 

 views as to how long we were going to stay or where 

 we were going afterwards. Possibly a Scotch accent 

 was unfamiliar to the inspector, for the police took 

 notice of us in a very open way, until after a few days 

 we sought out the Embassy and stated our case. An 

 agreeable young Englishman put some shrewd ques- 

 tions, laughed, and bestowed on us a lithographed 

 document, in which Lord Odo Russell, in the name 

 of Her Britannic Majesty, threw over us the protec- 

 tion of the British Empire in polite but peremptory 

 words. At that moment patriotism was born in me ; 

 the differences between the nations had become a 



