The Berlin of the late eighties was a very different city from the Berlin of to-day. There is probably no other Continental city which has undergone so many changes in the same period of time. When I wandered into the place nearly twenty years ago there were no electric cars--horses were still the exclusive motive power in the business streets; there was no rational direction of traffic--there isn't to-day in some parts; there were no automobiles that I can remember having seen; there were no great department stores such as now vie with those of New York; there was no such street lighting as there is to-day; and there were by no means so many Germans leaning on window sills and on the streets. Like Moscow, the place resembled a great overgrown village more than it did the capital of a great country. The people were provincial, the military upstarts often acted as if they thought the city had been built and was kept up for their exclusive entertainment, and strangers, particularly Americans, who ventured to dress as they do at home--white dresses in summer for ladies, for instance--were stared at as if they were a new species of human beings. In one particular, however, the city has not changed, and probably never will, _i.e._, in the amount of noise the Berliners are equal to when they are turned loose in the streets, afoot, in trains or in _Drosckken_. If it be true that the word _German_, philologically dissected, means a shouter in battle, then the word Berliner means two shouters talking about a battle. The incessant ya-yaing and nein-neining in the streets, the perspiring and nervous self-consciousness that comes to a large-boned populace suddenly advanced to _Welt-Stadt_ significance, the reckless driving of the cabbies, the screams of the cabbies' victims, these all contribute to the present provinciality of the metropolis, in spite of the modern trolleys, automobiles, half-Londonized policemen, and taxameter cabs. Indeed, these very appurtenances of cosmopolitan, the crunching trolley, for instance, and the puffing "auto," accentuate very strikingly the undue emphasis which the town puts in noises, and are indicative of its lust for more. Twenty years ago the shouting and buzzing were not so bad, but the city is now making up for any silences that may have been observed at that time.