it so happened that among the ballads in the lesson for that day was one in honour of the Prussian troops at Rossbach. Over this the old soldier broke out into an animated lecture, which grew more and more earnest as he went forward; he showed how the idea of faithfulness to duty had become obscured, but was enforced again by the philosopher Kant in his teaching, and then brought into practice by the great Frederick. The veteran plainly thought there was no duty higher than that owed to the _schwarzer Adler_, the black eagle of Prussia. Then came an account of the French horse before Rossbach; how they rode out from Weimar, the troopers, before they went, ripping open the beds on which they had slept and scattering the feathers to the wind to plague the housewives,--a piece of ruthlessness that came home thoroughly to the young housekeepers; then how _der alte Fritz_, lying in wait behind Janus Hill, with General Seydlitz and Field-marshal Keith, suddenly rushed out and put them all to rout. The soldier was in a fever of patriotism and rage against the French before his description was finished, and the faces of the girls kindled in response. "They will some time," I thought, "be lovers, wives, mothers of Prussian soldiers themselves, and this training will keep alive in the home the national fire." Admirable schools they all were, the presence of the spiked helmet notwithstanding, and crowning them in the great Prussian educational system came the famous universities. That at Berlin counted its students by thousands, its professors by hundreds. There was no branch of human knowledge without its teacher. One could study Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Assyrian arrow-head inscriptions. A new pimple could hardly break out on the blotched face of the moon, without a lecture from a professor next day to explain the theory of its development. The poor earthquakes were hardly left to shake in peace an out-of-the-way strip of South American coast or Calabrian plain, but a German professor violated their privacy, undertook to see whence they came and whither they went, and even tried to predict when they would go to shaking again. The vast building of the University stood on Unter den Linden, opposite the palace of the king. Large as it was, its halls were crowded at the end of every hour by the thousand or two of young men, who presently disappeared within the lecture-rooms. Here in past years had been Hegel and Fichte, the brothers Grimm, the brothers Humboldt, Niebuhr, and Carl Ritter. Here in my time, were Lepsius and Curtius, Virchow and Hoffman, Ranke and Mommsen,--the world's first scholars in the past and present. The student selected his lecturers, then went day by day through the semester to the plain lecture-rooms, taking notes diligently at benches which had been whittled well by his predecessors, and where he too most likely carved his own autograph and perhaps the name of the dear girl he