Sometimes in the mornings after my ride I would walk with the officer who taught English and converse with him, so that he might have the benefit of my accent; and once he took me to the _Schule_ and installed me in his class, to hear how he instructed his thirty boys there. He was a most intelligent teacher, and spoke very correct English. It amused me to hear some of the pupils reciting “Rule Britannia” out of their English Reading-Books. It sounded like a derisive challenge as they declaimed the poem with that clear, distinct utterance specially cultivated in all German schools. I could with difficulty keep from smiling to hear a young German piping its bombastic lines: “All thine shall be the subject main, And every shore it circles thine. Rule Britannia, etc.,” while Kiel, with its rapidly increasing war-fleet, lay only an hour’s journey away. But they were very pleasant and kindly, all those German officers; they showed me their class-rooms, their gymnasium, everything that they thought could interest me. If they knew only two words of English they said those two; but as I was by that time a fairly fluent speaker of German, we were able to exchange views without any difficulty. That rather hard, harsh, overbearing Prussian spirit that one meets in Berlin here seemed softened and humanized, and the atmosphere of the place was not so rigid and mechanical as military institutions are apt to be. It is true that the boys, whenever addressed, instantly fell into those stiff, wooden military attitudes which are a little disconcerting to unaccustomed people, squaring their shoulders, putting their heels together and lifting up their chins; but when one got used to it it was not so noticeable. The general impression gained from the military ideal as applied to education in Germany is that, while excellently thorough and practical, it yet ignores too much those other world-forces due to science, invention and discovery, which day by day are changing the conditions of life among the nations--that it cherishes a spirit more suitable to past ages than to present progress. It seems to breed up a class of men who are earnest, loyal, and self-sacrificing, but express extremely narrow views, who see and judge everything from a purely military, autocratic standpoint, and are quite unable to sympathize with or understand the aspirations of the normal human being towards personal initiative and liberty of action.