"Take care you don't go in at an _Ausgang_ or out at an _Eingang_," said an Englishman who had just come back from Berlin. "Take care you don't try to buy stamps at the Post Office out of your turn. Remember that you can't choose your cab when you arrive. A policeman gives you a number, and you have to hunt amongst a crowd of cabs for that number, even if it is pouring with rain. Remember that the police decides that you must buy your opera tickets on a Sunday morning, and stand _queue_ for hours till you get them. If you have a cold in your head, stay at home. Last winter a man was arrested for sneezing loudly. It was considered _Beamtenbeleidigung_. The Englishwoman who walked on the grass in the Tiergarten was not arrested, because the official who saw her died of shock at the sight, and could not perform his duty." Wherever you go in Germany you hear stories of police interference and petty tyranny, and it is mere luck if you do not innocently transgress some of their fussy pedantic regulations. In South Germany I once put a cream jug on my window-sill to keep a little milk cool for the afternoon. The jug was so small and the window so high that it can hardly have been visible from the street, but my landlady came to me excitedly and said the police would be on her before the day was out if the jug was left there. The police allowed nothing on a window-sill in that town, lest it should fall on a citizen's head. Each town or district has its own restrictions, its own crimes. In one you will hear that a butcher boy is not allowed on the side-path carrying his tray of meat. If a policeman catches him at it, he, or his employer, is fined. In another town the awning from a shop window must not exceed a certain length, and you are told of a poor widow, who, having just had a new one put up at great expense, was compelled by the police to take the whole thing down, because the flounce was a quarter of an inch longer than the regulations prescribed. You hear of a poor man laboriously building a toy brick wall round the garden in his _Hof_, and having to pull it to pieces because "building" is not allowed except with police permission. In some towns the length of a woman's gown is decided in the _Polizeibureau_, and the officers fine any woman whose skirt touches the ground. In one town you may take a dog out without a muzzle; in another it is a crime. A merchant on his way to his office, in a city where there was a muzzling order, found to his annoyance, one morning, that his mother's dog had followed him unmuzzled. He had no string with him, he could not persuade the dog to return, and he could not go back with it, because he had an important appointment. So he risked it and went on. Before long, however, he met a policeman. The usual questions were asked, his name and address were taken, and he was told that he would be fined. Hardly had he got to the end of the street when he met a second policeman. He explained