But while our foreigner has been hurrying from one palace to another, with his mind in a fog of historical and topographical confusion--if he is an American, half-hoping, half-expecting to meet the Emperor or Empress and secure a bow from one or other, or--why not?--one of William's well-known vigorous _poignées de main_, there is always one thought predominant in his mind--Sans Souci. That is the real object of his quest, the main attraction that has brought him, all unconscious of it, to Berlin, and not the laudable, but wholly mistaken efforts of the "Society for the Promotion of Tourist Traffic," which seeks to lure the moneyed and reluctant foreigner to the German capital. Our foreigner enters the Park of Sans Souci and his spirit is at rest. Now he knows where he really is--not in the wonderful new German Empire, not in modern Berlin with its splendid and to him unspeaking streets, its garish "night-life," its faultily-faultless municipal propriety, not in Potsdam, "the true cradle of the Prussian army," as Baedeker, deviating for an instant into metaphor, describes it, but simply in Sans Souci. He is now no longer in the twentieth century, but the eighteenth--one hundred and fifty years ago or more--in Frederick's day, the period of pigtails, of giant grenadiers in the old-time blue and red coats, the high and fantastic shako made of metal and tapering to a point, of three-cornered hats resting on powdered wigs, of yellow top-boots, and exhaling the general air of ruffianly geniality characteristic of the manners and soldiers of the age.