How wonderfully well built these German cities are! There is scarcely a town in England which can compare in beauty and picturesqueness with such cities as Düsseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, or Frankfort-on-the-Main, with their great wide streets avenued with trees, their artistic buildings, the lavish display in public places of statuary of a high order, and the ease with which one can find one’s way about. [Illustration: CHEETAHS OR HUNTING LEOPARDS. (Photo by Ottomar Anschütz, Berlin.)] The Zoological Garden in Hanover is well worth a visit. It is situated in a shady wood, and contains some very quaint houses. The first house one encounters is devoted to cranes and herons. In the centre of the Garden is a duck-pond with an island in the middle, upon which are placed what look like tiny dog-kennels. In these little houses the water-fowl build their nests. In the monkey house were a hamadrya and a remarkably fine baboon, both animals comparatively rare in collections. There is a substantially built bear castle well filled, and close to it is the concert-hall, in which a fine band was playing when I visited the Garden. From the top of a high arch of rockwork a view of the whole Garden can be obtained, but there are so many trees in it that the view is somewhat disappointing. There is a large and handsome antelope and camel house, with dome and minarets, containing Shetland ponies, camels, zebus, white-tailed gnus, an _Oryx leucoryx_, black buck, an ostrich, a rhea, some donkeys, a zebra, a roan antelope, and a Cape hartebeest, the last two rarely seen in collections--in fact, the Cape hartebeest is the first I saw on the Continent. He was very nervous and restless, and utterly refused to stand still to be photographed. A lion house contained two remarkably fine lions. It is curious how wonderfully well lions thrive in captivity and what fine manes they grow. I have seen several lions in the African jungle, but not one had a mane to compare with those carried by menagerie beasts. This is accounted for partly because in a cage there is no thorn-bush to tear the hair, and partly because the food is better and more regular, causing less mange in the skin. Besides lions there were leopards, pumas, cheetahs, a black leopard, and some tiny bear-cubs in the lion house. In a house built just like a church with a steeple was a huge Asiatic elephant, a smaller elephant, and a hippopotamus. Pens of yak and American bison, several deer, dogs, and wolves, and a parrot house brought a very interesting collection to a close. Crowds of people watched the animals, listened to the band, or drank coffee in the restaurant, the extremely pretty uniforms of numbers of soldiers adding to the picturesqueness of the scene. CHAPTER XVIII ZOOLOGISCHER GARTEN, HAMBURG: DIRECTOR, DR. BOLAU