I watched interestedly to see how the character of the people, soil and climate would change as we crossed the frontier into Germany. Every other country I had entered had presented a great contrast to the last. After passing fifteen or twenty Swiss towns and small cities, perhaps more, we finally reached Basle and there the crew was changed. I did not know it, being busy thinking of other things, until an immense, rotund, guttural-voiced conductor appeared at the door and wanted to know if I was bound for Frankfort. I looked out. It was just as I expected: another world and another atmosphere had been substituted for that of Switzerland. Already the cars and depot platforms were different, heavier I thought, more pretentious. Heavy German porters (packträger) were in evidence. The cars, the vast majority of them here, bore the label of Imperial Germany--the wide-winged, black eagle with the crown above it, painted against a pinkish-white background, with the inscription “Kaiserlicher Deutsche Post.” A station-master, erect as a soldier, very large, with splendiferous parted whiskers, arrayed in a blue uniform and cap, regulated the departure of trains. The “Uscita” and “Entrata” of Italy here became “Eingang” and “Ausgang,” and the “Bagaglia” of every Italian station was here “Gepäck.” The endless German “Verboten,” and “Es ist untersagt” also came into evidence. We rolled out into a wide, open, flat, mountainless plain with only the thin poplars of France in evidence and no waterways of any kind, and then I knew that Switzerland was truly no more. If you want to see how the lesser Teutonic countries vary from this greater one, the dominant German Empire, pass this way from Switzerland into Germany, or from Germany into Holland. At Basle, as I have said, we left the mountains for once and for all. I saw but few frozen peaks after Lucerne. As we approached Basle they seemed to grow less and less and beyond that we entered a flat plain, as flat as Kansas and as arable as the Mississippi Valley, which stretched unbroken from Basle to Frankfort and from Frankfort to Berlin. Judging from what I saw the major part of Germany is a vast prairie, as flat as a pancake and as thickly strewn with orderly, new, bright forceful towns as England is with quaint ones.