Still, he must take you as _far_ for fifteen cents as the other horse takes you for twenty-five. If he can’t do his fifteen-minute distance in fifteen minutes, he must still do the distance for the fifteen cents. Any stranger can check the distance off—by means of the most curious map I am acquainted with. It is issued by the city government and can be bought in any shop for a trifle. In it every street is sectioned off, like a string of long beads of different colours. Each long bead represents a minute’s travel, and when you have covered fifteen of the beads you have got your money’s worth. This map of Berlin is a gay-coloured maze, and looks like pictures of the circulation of the blood. The streets are very clean. They are kept so—not by prayer and talk, and the other New York methods, but by daily and hourly work with scrapers and brooms; and when an asphalted street has been tidily scraped after a rain or a light snowfall, they scatter clean sand over it. This saves some of the horses from falling down. In fact, this is a city government which seems to stop at no expense where the public convenience, comfort, and health are concerned—except in one detail. That is the naming of the streets and the numbering of the houses. Sometimes the name of a street will change in the middle of a block. You will not find it out till you get to the next corner and discover the new name on the wall, and of course you don’t know just when the change happened. The names are plainly marked on the corners—on all the corners—there are no exceptions. But the numbering of the houses—there has never been anything like it since original chaos. It is not possible that it was done by this wise city government. At first one thinks it was done by an idiot; but there is too much variety about it for that; an idiot could not think of so many different ways of making confusion and propagating blasphemy. The numbers run up one side the street and down the other. That is endurable, but the rest isn’t. They often use one number for three or four houses—and sometimes they put the number on only one of the houses, and let you guess at the others. Sometimes they put a number on a house—4, for instance—then put 4_a_, 4_b_, 4_c_, on the succeeding houses, and one becomes old and decrepit before he finally arrives at 5. A result of this systemless system is, that when you are at No. 1 in a street, you haven’t any idea how far it may be to No. 150; it may be only six or eight blocks, it may be a couple of miles. Frederick Street is long, and is one of the great thoroughfares. The other day a man put up his money behind the assertion that there were more refreshment places in that street than numbers on the houses—and he won. There were 254 numbers and 257 refreshment places. Yet, as I have said, it is a long street.