object was the redoubt with the North German flag. When in midsummer I crossed the Bavarian frontier among a softer people, the last marked object was the old stronghold of Coburg, battered by siege after siege for a thousand years. It was the spiked helmet at the entrance and again at the exit; and from entrance to exit, few places or times were free from some martial suggestion. It was a nation that had come to power mainly through war, and been schooled into the belief that its mailed fists alone could guarantee its life. I visited a primary school. The little boys of six came with knapsacks strapped to their backs for their books and dinners, instead of satchels. At the tap of a bell they formed themselves into column and marched like little veterans to the schoolroom door. I visited a school for boys of thirteen or fourteen. Casting my eyes into the yard, I saw the spiked helmet in the shape of the half-military manoeuvres of a class which the teacher of gymnastics was training for the severer drill of five or six years later. I visited the "prima," or upper class of a gymnasium, and here was the spiked helmet in a connection that seemed at first rather irreverent. After all, however, it was only thoroughly Prussian, and deserved to be looked upon as a comical incongruity rather than gravely blamed. A row of cheap pictures hung side by side upon the wall. First Luther, the rougher characteristics of the well-known portrait somewhat exaggerated. The shoulders were even larger than common. The bony buttresses of the forehead over the eyes, too, as they rose above the strong lower face, were emphasised, looking truly as though, if tongue and pen failed to make a way, the shoulders could push one, and, if worse came to worst, the head would butt one. Next to Luther was a head of Christ; then in the same line, with nothing in the position or quality of the pictures to indicate that the subjects were any less esteemed, a row of royal personages, whose military trappings were made particularly plain. It was all characteristic enough. The Reformer's figure stood for the stalwart Protestantism of the Prussian character, still living and militant in a way hard for us to imagine; the portraits of the royal soldiers stood for its combative loyalty, ready to meet anything for king and fatherland; and the head of Christ for its zealous faith, which, however it may have cooled away among some classes of the people, was still intense in the nation at large. I visited the best school for girls in Berlin, and it was singular to find the spiked helmet, among those retiring maidens even, and this time not hung upon the wall nor outside in the yard. The teacher of the most interesting class I visited--a class in German literature--was a man of forty-five, of straight, soldierly bearing, a grey, martial moustache, and energetic eye. He told me, as we walked together in the hall, waiting for the exercise to commence, that he had been a soldier, and