When you first get back to England from Germany, you have to pull yourself together and remember that in your own country, even on a hot still summer evening, you cannot sit in a garden where a band is playing and have your dinner in the open air, unless you happen to be within reach of Earl's Court. In German towns there are always numbers of restaurants in which, according to the weather, meals can be served indoors or out. You see what use people make of them if, for instance, you happen to be in Hamburg on a hot summer night. All round the basin of the Alster there are houses, hotels, and gardens, and every public garden is so crowded that you wonder the waiters can pass to and fro. Bands are playing, lights are flashing, the little sailing boats are flitting about. The whole city after its day's work has turned out for air and music and to talk with friends. And as you watch the scene you know that in every city, even in every village of the empire, there is some such gala going on: in gardens going down to the Rhine from the old Rhenish towns; in the gardens of ancient castles set high above the stifling air of valleys; in the forest that comes to the very edge of so many little German towns; even in the streets of towns where a table set on the pavement will be pleasanter than in a room on such a night as this. You can sit at one of these restaurants and order nothing but a cup of coffee or a glass of beer; or you can dine, for the most part, well and cheaply. If you order a _halbe Portion_ of any dish, as Germans do, you will be served with more than you can eat of it. The variety offered by some of the restaurants in the big cities, the excellence of the cooking, the civilisation of the appointments, and the service, all show that the German must be the most industrious creature in the world, and the thriftiest and one of the cleverest. In London we have luxurious restaurants for people who can spend a great deal of money, but in Berlin they have them for people who cannot spend much. That is the difference between the two cities. How Berlin does it is a mystery. In the restaurants I have seen there is neither noise nor bustle nor garish colours nor rough service nor any other of the miseries we find in our own cheap eating-houses. In one of them the walls were done in some kind of plain fumed wood with a frieze and ceiling of soft dull gold. In another each room had a different scheme of colour. "So according to your _Stimmung_ you will choose your room," said the friends who took me. "To-night we are rather cheerful. We will go to the big room on the first floor. That is all pale green and ivory." "You have nothing like this in England," said the artist as we went up the lift. "It is terrible in England. When I asked for my lunch at three or four o'clock I was told that lunch was over. _Das hat keinen Zweck_,--I want my lunch when I am hungry."