Except on official or formal occasions it seems a matter of questionable good taste to appear, say in a hotel restaurant, with one's breast hung with medals or with orders on one's coat or in the button-hole. Let 'em find out what a big boy am I without help from self-imposed placards seems to me to be perhaps the more modest way. The method in vogue in Japanese temples, where the worshippers jangle a bell to call the attention of the gods to their prayers or offerings, seems out of place where the god is merely the casual man in the street, in a Berlin restaurant. At more than one dinner the soup is followed by a meat course, after which comes the fish. This does not mean that the dinners are not good. I fondly recall a dish of sauerkraut boiled in white wine and served in a pineapple. I may not give names, but the dinners of Mr. and Mrs. Fourth of December, of Mrs. Twenty-first of January, of Mr. and Mrs. Thirtieth of January, and of Mr. and Mrs. February First, and others rank very high in my gastronomic calendar. Do not imagine from what I have written that Lucullus has left no disciples in Germany. I could easily add a page to the list I have mentioned, and because we look upon some of these customs of the German as absurd is no reason for forgetting that he often, and from his stand-point rightly, looks upon us as boors. I like the Germans and I pretend to have learned very much from them. To sneer at superficial differences is to lose all profit from intercourse with other peoples. Goethe is right, "Uberall lernt man nur von dem, den man liebt!" The argument is only all on our side when we are impervious to impressions and to other standards of manners and morals than our own. "Am Ende hangen wir doch ab Von Kreaturen die wir machten" are two lines at least from the second part of "Faust" that we can all understand. It is sometimes thrown at us Americans that we love a title, and that we are not averse to the ornamentation of our names with pseudo and attenuated "Honorables" and "Colonels" and "Judge" and so on; and I am bound to admit the impeachment, for I blush at some of my be-colonelled and becaptained friends, and wonder at their rejoicing over such effeminate honorifics, especially those colonelcies born of clattering behind a civilian governor, on a badly ridden horse, a title which may be compared with that most attenuated title of all, that of a Texan, who when asked why he was called "colonel" replied, that he had married the widow of a colonel! I prefer "Esqr." to "Mr." merely because it makes it easier to assort the daily mail; "Mr.," "Mrs.," and "Miss" are so easily taken for one another on an envelope, and particularly at Christmas time this more distinctly legible title avoids, the deplorable misdirection of the secrets of Santa Claus; aside from that I am happy to be addressed merely by my name, like any other sovereign.