[Footnote B: Ratisbon has now (1914) a population of 53,000. Its manufactured products consist chiefly of pottery and lead pencils.] IV BERLIN AND ELSEWHERE A LOOK AT THE GERMAN CAPITAL[A] BY THEOPHILE GAUTIER The train spins along across great plains gilded by the setting sun; soon night comes, and with it, sleep. At stations remote from one another, German voices shout German names; I do not recognize them by the sound, and look for them in vain upon the map. Magnificent great station buildings are shown up by gaslight in the midst of surrounding darkness, then disappear. We pass Hanover and Minden; the train keeps on its way; and morning dawns. On either side stretched a peat-moss, upon which the mist was producing a singular mirage. We seemed to be upon a causeway traversing an immense lake whose waves crept up gently, dying in transparent folds along the edge of the embankment. Here and there a group of trees or a cottage, emerging like an island, completed the illusion, for such it was. A sheet of bluish mist, floating a little above the ground and curling up along its upper surface under the rays of the sun, caused this aqueous phantasmagoria, resembling the Fata Morgana of Sicily. In vain did my geographical knowledge protest, disconcerted, against this inland sea, which no map of Prussia indicates; my eyes would not give it up, and later in the day, when the sun, rising higher, had dried up this imaginary lake, they required the presence of a boat to make them admit that any body of water could be real. Suddenly upon the left were massed the trees of a great park; Tritons and Nereids appeared, dabbling in the basin of a fountain; there was a dome and a circle of columns rising above extensive buildings; and this was Potsdam.... A few moments later we were in Berlin, and a fiacre set me down at the hotel. One of the keenest pleasures of a traveler is that first drive through a hitherto unknown city, destroying or confirming his preconceived idea of it. All that is peculiar and characteristic seizes upon the yet virgin eye, whose perceptive power is never more clear. My idea of Berlin had been drawn in great measure from Hoffman's fantastic stories. In spite of myself, a Berlin, strange and grotesque, peopled with Aulic councillors, sandmen, Kreislers, archivist Lindursts, and student Anselms, had reared itself within my brain, amid a fog of tobacco-smoke; and there before me was a city regularly built, stately, with wide streets, extensive public grounds, and imposing edifices of a style half-English, half-German, and modern to the last degree.