That Berlin was hungry was all too evident, so patent, in fact, that I feel it my duty to set down in a place apart the gruesome details of famine and warn the reader to peruse them only in the presence of a full-course dinner. But the overcrowding was at first glance less apparent. Indeed, a superficial glimpse of the heart of Prussianism showed it surprisingly like what it had been a decade before. The great outdoor essentials were virtually unaltered. Only as one amassed bit by bit into a convincing whole the minor evidences of change, as an experienced lawyer pieces together the scattered threads of circumstantial proof, did one reach the conclusion that Berlin was no longer what she used to be. Her great arteries of suburban railways, her elevated and underground, pulsated regularly, without even that clogging of circulation that threatened the civic health of her great temperamental rival to the west. Her shops and business houses seemed, except in one particular, well stocked and prosperous; her sources of amusement were many and well patronized. Her street throngs certainly were not shabby in appearance and they showed no outward signs of leading a hampered existence. True, they were unusually gaunt-featured—but here we are encroaching on ground to be explored under more propitious alimentary circumstances. Of the revolution, real or feigned, through which it had recently passed, the city bore surprisingly few scars. Three or four government buildings were pockmarked with bullet-holes that carried the mind back to “election” days in the capitals of tropical America; over in Alexanderplatz the bricks and stones flaunted a goodly number of shrapnel and machine-gun wounds. But that was all, or almost all, the proof of violence that remained. The palaces of the late Kaiser stood like abandoned warehouses; the Reichstag building was cold and silent, testifying to a change of venue for the government on trial, if not of régime. Yet it could not, after all, have been much of a “revolution” that had left unscathed those thirty-two immense and sometimes potbellied images of the noble Hohenzollerns, elaborately carved in stone, which still oppressed the stroller along the Sieges Allee in the otherwise pleasant Tiergarten. The massive wooden Hindenburg at the end of it, a veritable personification of brute strength from cropped head to well-planted feet, stared down upon puny mankind as of yore, though, to be sure, he looked rather neglected; the nailing had never been completed and the rare visitors passed him by now without any attempt to hammer home their homage. Farther on that other man of iron gazed away across the esplanade as if he saw nothing in this temporary abandonment of his principles to cause serious misgivings.