wanted flowers and fruit. In Berlin there are twelve covered markets besides the open ones, and they are all as admirably clean, tidy, and unpoetical as everything else is in that spick and span, swept and garnished Philistine city. The green gooseberries there are marked "unripe fruit" by order of the police, so that no one should think they were ripe and eat them uncooked; and you can buy rhubarb nowadays, a vegetable the modern Berliner eats without shuddering. But in a Berlin market you buy what you need as quickly as you can and come away. There is nothing to tempt you, nothing picturesque, nothing German, if German brings to your mind a queer mixture of poetry and music, gabled, tumbledown houses, storks' nests, toys, marvellous cakes and sweets and the kindliest of people. If you are so modern that German means nothing to you but drill and hustle, the roar of factories and the pride of monster municipal ventures, then you may see the markets of Berlin and rest content with them. They will show you what you already know of this day's Germany. But my household treasures gathered here and there in German markets did not have one added to their number in Berlin. "That!" said a German friend when I showed her a yellow pitcher dabbed with colour, and having a spout, a handle, and a lid,--"that! I would not have it in my kitchen." It certainly only cost the third of a penny, but it lived with honour in my drawing-room till it shared the fate of all clay, and came in two in somebody's hands. The blue and grey bellied bottle, one of those in which the Thuringian peasants carry beer to the field, cost three halfpence, but the butter-dish with a lid of the same ware only cost a halfpenny. There is always an immense heap of this rough grey and blue pottery in a South German market, and it is much prettier than the more ornate Coblenz ware we import and sell at high prices. So is the deep red earthenware glazed inside and rough outside and splashed with colours. You find plenty of it at the Leipziger Messe, that historical fair that used to be as important to Western Europe as Nijni Novgorod is to Russia and the East. To judge from modern German trade circulars, it is still of considerable importance, and the buildings in which merchants of all countries display their wares have recently been renovated and enlarged. Out of doors the various market-places are covered with little stalls selling cheap clothing, cheap toys, jewellery, sweets, and gingerbread; all the heterogeneous rubbish you have seen a thousand times at German fairs, and never tire of seeing if a fair delights you.