The modern doors have some machinery by which they shut themselves noiselessly after you. You hear a great deal more said about "nerves" in Germany than in England, and yet Germans seem to be amazingly indifferent to noise. They will not tolerate the brass bands and barrel-organs that pester us, but that is because they are fond of music. Screaming voices, banging doors, and the clatter of kitchens and business premises seem not to trouble them at all. Most houses in Berlin are five or six storeys high, and are built round the four sides of a small paved court. No one who has not lived in such a house, and in a room giving on the court, can understand how every sound increases and reverberates. Footsteps at dawn sound as if the seven-leagued boots had come, and were shod with iron. You whisper that the kitchen on a lower floor in an opposite corner looks well kept, and the maid hears what you say and looks at you smiling. I knew that the back premises of these big German hives might harbour any social grade and almost any industry, and for a long time I vowed that some one must live in our court whose business it was to hammer tin, and that he hammered it most late at night and early in the morning. I had not heard anything like the noise since I had lived in a high narrow German street paved with cobble-stones, and occupied just opposite my windows by a brewer whose vans returned to him at daybreak and tumbled empty casks at his door. But I never discovered my tin merchant in Berlin, and in time I had to admit that my hosts were right. The noise I complained of was made by the cook washing up in the opposite kitchen. I should not have noticed it if I had been a sensible person, and slept with my curtains drawn and my double windows tight shut.