Plainly the place was popular. Germans of all conditions and all ages
and all sizes--but mainly the broader lasts--were winding about in thick
streams in the narrow, crooked alleys formed by the various tents. They
packed themselves in front of each booth where a free exhibition was
going on, and when the free part was over and the regular performance
began they struggled good-naturedly to pay the admission fee and enter
in at the door.
And, for a price, there were freaks to be seen who properly belonged on
our side of the water, it seemed to me. I had always supposed them to be
exclusively domestic articles until I encountered them here. There was a
regular Bosco--a genuine Herr He Alive Them Eats--sitting in his canvas
den entirely surrounded by a choice and tasty selection of eating
snakes. The orthodox tattooed man was there, too, first standing up to
display the text and accompanying illustrations on his front cover, and
then turning round so the crowd might read what he said on the other
side. And there was many another familiar freak introduced to our
fathers by Old Dan Rice and to us, their children, through the good
offices of Daniel's long and noble line of successors.
A seasonable Sunday is a fine time; and the big Zoological Garden, which
is a favorite place for studying the Berlin populace at the diversions
they prefer when left to their own devices. At one table will be a
cluster of students, with their queer little pill-box caps of all
colors, their close-cropped heads and well-shaved necks, and their
saber-scarred faces. At the next table half a dozen spectacled,
long-coated men, who look as though they might be university professors,
are confabbing earnestly. And at the next table and the next and the
next--and so on, until the aggregate runs into big figures--are family
groups--grandsires, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles and children, on
down to the babies in arms. By the uncountable thousands they spend the
afternoon here, munching sausages and sipping lager, and enjoying the
excellent music that is invariably provided. At each plate there is a
beer mug, for everybody is forever drinking and nobody is ever drunk.
You see a lot of this sort of thing, not only in the parks and gardens
so numerous in and near any German city but anywhere on the Continent.
Seeing it helps an American to understand a main difference between the
American Sabbath and the European Sunday. We keep it and they spend it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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