A confused murmur of admiration rose from the shadowy groups about me. At the far end of the parade-ground the Royal Stand was all ready for the next day's review. The Hanover Strasse, the finest street in Lautenburg, was thronged with people, who were walking up and down on the pavements, as if impelled by some mechanical device. At a given moment the barracks poured out a stream of uniforms. The red tunics of the Lautenburg Hussars blended with the blue of the Detmold Dragoons and the dark jackets of the infantrymen. Students who had come specially from Hanover, flaunted their various caps and duelling scars with an arrogance which vanished quickly whenever they passed an officer. Thanks to the approach of Christmas, the brilliantly-lighted shop-fronts were crammed with a mass of weird and fantastic wares, the childishness of which was enough to make you weep. The provision stores were crammed with geese absurdly decorated with the colours of the twenty-seven German States. A goose adorned with the Rudolstadt blue was cheek by jowl with a goose in Würtemberg red. The pork butchers exhibited pyramids of sausages made in the shape of the most famous public buildings in the Empire--the Reichstag, the Central Station at Berlin, Cologne Cathedral, etc. But the masterpiece was a triumphal arch of lard, with bas-reliefs in red jelly and an entablature of _foie gras_. Girls strolled along in parties of three or four, arm in arm, modestly lowering their eyes under the insolent stares of the officers. I dined at the Lohengrin tavern, the largest and most ornate in Lautenburg. You remember the roundabouts of our childhood. The part reserved for the band and the old blear-eyed, tinsel-covered nag bears a very striking resemblance to a fashionable German tavern. They are the only places, I think, where people can smoke without inconvenience. The clouds of tobacco smoke which rise to the ceiling suggest nothing so much as a rabelaisian Walhalla. It was striking eight when yells of "_Hoch_! _hoch_!" in the street brought the diners _en masse_ to the door. Amid a forest of sabres a squadron of dragoons was on its way to the station to act as guard of honour to the King of Würtemberg and General von Eichhorn. There was such a mob around the station that I gave up any idea of trying to get in. It was from a corner of the Roon Strasse that I managed to get a glimpse, through the hedge of dragoons, of the car in which the Grand Duke Frederick-Augustus and the King of Würtemberg were sitting opposite my pupil and General von Eichhorn.