We were greeted by a hot cloying smell, which under ordinary circumstances would instantly have driven me out again, a smell of old dough, and fermenting strawberries, mingled with a flavour of chocolate and Vanilla, a smell that only an inveterate sweet-tooth or a youth in love could by possibility have consented to inhale! Added to this, the room was not much more than six feet high, and apparently never ventilated, except by the chance opening of the door. How my friend could ever have expected to find the Dresden Evening Times in such an out-of-the-way shop as this was a puzzle to me. Very soon, however, I discovered what it was that had lured him again--spite of his disappointment--into this distressing atmosphere. Behind the small counter on which was displayed a limited selection of uninviting tarts and cakes, I could see in the dusky window-seat behind the brown blind, a young girl dressed in the simplest printed cotton gown possible, her thick black hair just parted and cut short behind, a piece of knitting in her hands, which she only laid down when after some delay and uncertainty we had determined upon the inevitable cherry-tarts. My friend who hardly dared to look at her, still less to speak, went into the narrow, dark, and most comfortless little inner room, where the "Vossische Journal," and the "Observer on the Spree" outspread on a round table before the faded sofa, kept up a faint semblance of a reading-room. A small fly-blinded mirror hung on the wall between the two wooden-framed lithographs of King Frederick William III. and Queen Louise, over which was a bronzed bust of old Bluecher squeezed in between the top of the stove and the low ceiling and looking gruffly down. Sebastian had thrown himself in feverish haste into one corner of the sofa, I into the other, when the young girl came in with the small plates for the tarts. I was now able to look at her leisurely, for she waited to light a gas-burner, it being already too dark to read. She was rather short than tall, but her figure was so symmetrical, so round, yet slender, that the eye followed her every movement with rapture, spite of her unbecoming, and almost ugly dress. Her feet, which were made visible to us by her standing on tip-toe to reach the gas burner, were daintily small as those of a child of ten, her little deft snow-white fingers looked as if they had always rested on a silken lap. What white things she had on, a small upright collar, cuffs, and a waitress's apron, were so immaculately clean as to form a striking contrast with the stained carpet, dusty furniture, and traces of the flies of a hundred summers visible on all around.