Half-way between Nikola’s store and the Imperial palace was an old chop-house, called Habel, dating from the time of Frederick the Great. Frederick’s generals always stopped there for a glass of wine, when they returned from an audience with the king. The custom persisted and was still in existence when I was a student in Berlin. Nikola often invited me to early luncheon at this chop-house, and there we saw the great generals and marshals of the German Empire, sitting around a long and separate table and taking a glass of wine after returning from the Imperial palace, from their daily audience with old Emperor William. It was a wonderful sight; those tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, brainy, and serious-minded Teuton warriors inspired tremendous respect. Nikola assured me that he knew many of them personally, they being his customers, and that as human beings they were as gentle as doves. “Many a time I called them down when they joked about my cigarettes, and they submitted without a murmur. Do you call that arrogance?” asked Nikola, throwing out his chest and trying to look as stern and as imposing as any of the generals present. Once he took me to an avenue where Moltke used to walk and showed me the great field-marshal, who was then eighty-six years old, but still as straight as an arrow. “Did you ever see a more modest and thoughtful or a more spiritual-looking man anywhere?” asked Nikola, and I confessed that I had not. “Then stop your talk about Prussian pride!” exclaimed Nikola. On another occasion we walked to the park and he showed me Bismarck, riding on horseback, a friend and an adjutant accompanying him. Nikola saluted him and so did I, and Bismarck saluted back graciously. “Does he look like a brute, or like a fool who would try to convert by force all the Slavs into Germans?” asked Nikola, poking fun at my anti-Teutonic suspicions. “No,” said I, “I do not think he does; in fact, I think he looks very much like Helmholtz, except that there is much less spirituality in his face than in that of the great scientist.” “Helmholtz!” exclaimed Nikola, “even he would lose his saintly expression, if he had to carry the load of the whole empire upon his shoulders, the socialists on the top of his load pushing it one way, and the clericals at the bottom pushing it the other way.”