There were three things you might do without offense; you might bathe,

eat and sleep, only you must not sleep out loud. The citizen of

Barscheit was hemmed in by a set of laws which had their birth in the

dark dungeons of the Inquisition. They congealed the blood of a man

born and bred in a commercial country. If you broke a law, you were

relentlessly punished; there was no mercy. In America we make laws and

then hide them in dull-looking volumes which the public have neither

the time nor the inclination to read. In this duchy of mine it was

different; you ran into a law on every corner, in every park, in every

public building: little oblong signs, enameled, which told you that you

could _not_ do something or other--"Forbidden!" The beauty of German

laws is that when you learn all the things that you can not do, you

begin to find out that the things you can do are not worth a hang in

the doing.

As soon as a person learned to read he or she began life by reading

these laws. If you could not read, so much the worse for you; you had

to pay a guide who charged you almost as much as the full cost of the

fine.

The opposition political party in the United States is always howling

militarism, without the slightest idea of what militarism really is.

One side, please, in Barscheit, when an officer comes along, or take

the consequences. If you carelessly bumped into him, you were knocked

down. If you objected, you were arrested. If you struck back, ten to

one you received a beating with the flat of a saber. And never, never

mistake the soldiery for the police; that is to say, never ask an

officer to direct you to any place. This is regarded in the light of

an insult. The cub-lieutenants do more to keep a passable

sidewalk--for the passage of said cub-lieutenants--than all the

magistrates put together. How they used to swagger up and down the

Königsstrasse, around the Platz, in and out of the restaurants! I

remember doing some side-stepping myself, and I was a diplomat,

supposed to be immune from the rank discourtesies of the military. But

that was early in my career.

In a year not so remote as not to be readily recalled, the United

States packed me off to Barscheit because I had an uncle who was a

senator. Some papers were given me, the permission to hang out a

shingle reading "American Consul," and the promise of my board and

keep. My amusements were to be paid out of my own pocket. Straightway

I purchased three horses, found a capable Japanese valet, and selected

a cozy house near the barracks, which stood west of the Volksgarten, on

a pretty lake. A beautiful road ran around this body of water, and it

wasn't long ere the officers began to pass comments on the riding of

"that wild American." As I detest what is known as park-riding, you

may very well believe that I circled the lake at a clip which must have

opened the eyes of the easy-going officers. I grew quite chummy with a

few of them; and I may speak of occasions when I did not step off the

sidewalk as they came along. A man does more toward gaining the

affection of foreigners by giving a good dinner now and then than by

international law. I gained considerable fame by my little dinners at

Müller's Rathskeller, under the Continental Hotel.




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