'Then in Prussia on crossing the frontier the authorities were most civil, cast an eye at the carriage, made a bow, and would not look at an article; the regulations of Prussia are in all departments most excellent, and a painstaking discipline exists everywhere, which makes the position of the traveller quite charming. Here only one side of the road is macadamized, the other half is the soil, but the road is very wide, so down hill you take the soil, very safe. All through Prussia, as far as I have been, the farming is very good, the land very clean, but the soil very, very poor; it is a great desert in fact, made habitable by the perseverance and industry of the people; round this town it is wonderful to see what can be done by the hand of man. This town stands in a desert of driving sand, but the town has created a soil round it which is now pushing the desert back every year, and it is now in the centre of a large circle of fine green fields and corn lands; of course the produce is not great but the labour is small, and the improvement progressing. The accommodation is very fair even to an Englishman. The innkeepers are a very respectable class, and though I have not seen a bed that is larger than a child's crib without curtains, yet they are clean, soft, and well made with lots of pillows for the head. 'Up to this time I have seen nothing but what I may call the outside of Berlin, my impression is that on the whole it is a very fine city. The public buildings are numerous. The architecture is fine, with more of the florid ornament than the style permits; much statuary and grouping of figures in marble and bronze. Streets wide, buildings low and large; but more of this bye and bye. 'My friend Schetky has been very useful to me in killing much "ennui" and comforting me when sick. He is an extraordinary fellow, sixty-three, with the spirits and fun of a boy, and the appetite of a horse. He is bent on going to Dantzig, so puts himself into the mail-post or public conveyance. He thinks he can make a picture [Footnote: Now at Sydney Lodge.] of the King's embarkation; I hope he may succeed, for he is a worthy soul. 'I have passed my morning in the museum of statues and pictures. The museum was founded in 1830 from designs by Schinkel; it is pure Greek Doric (I don't like it), a double column façade, up a great flight of steps; before the entrance stands a basin of polished red granite twenty-two feet in diameter, one block; it was a boulder that lay thirty miles from Berlin called the Markgrafenstein, it lay at a place called Fürstenwald.