the Oder, too, I find the steamer in which, at
some far remote period of my existence, I
suppose I am to occupy a berth. I find the
Preussicher Adler; but woe is me! she has
taken to her bed in a graving dock, and is a
pitiable sight to see. There being
something the matter with her boilers, they
have dismasted her, leaving her nothing
but clumsy stumps like wooden legs. They
are scraping her all over, for some cutaneous
disorder with which she is afflicted, I
presume; and they are re-coppering her bottom,
—an operation which German shipwrights
appear to me to perform with gum-arabic,
dutch metal, and a camel's-hair pencil.
Altogether the Prussian Eagle looks such a woe-
begone, moulting, tailless, broken-beaked
bird, and so very unlike going to Cronstadt,
that I flee from her in dismay; and boarding
the Geyser, which is trim, taut, and double-
funneled, steam swiftly through the Haf See
to Swinemunde, and then across the East Sea
to Copenhagen.

Plenty of time (miserere me) to see all that
is to be seen in the chief city of Denmark; to
take the English company's railway to
Roeskilde; to cross over to Malmoë in Sweden;
to go back to Stettin—to the devil, I think,
if this lasts much longer. There is a horrible
persuasion forcing itself upon me now—that
I live in Berlin; that my goal is there. Back
to Berlin I go. Letters are waiting for me.
People I didn't know from Adam a month
ago, and don't care a silbergroschen for
offer to kiss me on both cheeks, and
welcome me home. I suppose by this time I
am a Prussian subject, and shall have to
serve in the landwehr. Between that and
blowing one's brains out there is not much
difference.

I go back to Stettin, where I have a touch
of the overland longing again (it is now the
tenth of May), and a Jewish gentleman with
an apple-green gabardine, lined with cat-skin,
and a beard so ragged and torn, that I am
led to surmise that he has himself despoiled
the cats of their furry robes, and has suffered
severely in the contest, is exceedingly anxious
(he nosed me in the hotel lobby as an Englishman,
within an hour of my arrival), that I
should purchase a kibitka he has to sell. He
only wants fifty thalers for it: it is a splendid
kibitka, he says:—"sehr hübsch, schrecklich!
wunderschön"—so I go to look at it; for I feel
just in the sort of mood to buy a kibitka, or
an elephant, a diving-bell, a mangle, an organ
with an insane monkey to grind it, and throw
myself into the Oder immediately afterwards.
I look at the kibitka, which I am to horse
from stage to stage, and I deserve to be horsed
myself if I buy it, so lamentable an old shandrydan
is it. I quarrel with the Jew in the cat-
skins on the subject, who calls me lord, and
sheds tears. Finding that I am determined
not to throw away my thalers on his kibitka,
he with the elasticity in commercial transactions
common to his nation, proposes that I
should become the possessor of a splendid
dressing-case with silver mountings; but on
my remaining proof against this temptation,
as well as against that of a stock of prime
Hungarian tobacco, which is to be sold for a
mere song, he changes blithely from seller to
buyer, and generously offers to purchase at
advantageous rates, and for ready money,
any portion of my wardrobe I may consider
superfluous. He is not in the least offended
when I bid him go hang in the English
language, and walk away moodily—calling
after me in cheerful accents (by the title
of Well-Born Great British Sir), that he
has a fine English bull-pup to dispose of,
dirt cheap.

After this, I have another look at the
"Preussicher Adler," which, by this time, has been
turned, for coppering purposes, nearly keel
upwards, and looks as if she had abandoned
herself to despair, as I have. Walk the streets
of Stettin I dare not, for I am pursued by the
hideous spectre of Thomas Tilder aus Tyrol
of whom more anon. Yes, Thomas, in these
pages shall you like noxious bat on barn-
door, be spread out with nails of type! And,
as for Berlin, I am ashamed to show
my face there again. The very clerks
at the station seem to think it quite time for
me to be in Russia, and I am afraid the head
waiter at the Hôtel de Russie, took it very ill
that I came back last time. Yet I journey
there, and back, and there again; and in
one of my journeys to Berlin I have my
passport made good for Russia. The process
is a solemn and intricate one, and merits a
few words of notice. There is plenty of time;
they are hammering away at the Prussian
Eagle's boilers yet. First, with great fear
and trembling, I go to the Hotel of the
Russian Embassy, which is a tremendous
mansion, as big as a castle, under the Linden.
I have borne the majority of Foreign
Legations abroad with tolerable equanimity;
but I am quite overcome here by the grandeur,
and the double eagle over the gate, and
the vastness of the court-yard, and the odour of
a diplomatic dinner, which is being cooked
(probably in stew-pans of gold from the Ural
mountains); but I am especially awed by a
house-porter, or Suisse, of gigantic stature,
possibly the largest Suisse that ever human
ambassador possessed. He is not exactly
like a beadle, nor a drum-major, nor an
archbishop (he wears a gold-embroidered
alb), nor a Field Marshal, nor Garter King
at Arms, nor My Lord on May-day, but is
something between all these functionaries in
appearance. He has a long gilt-headed pole
in his hand, much more like the "mast of
some tall Ammiral," than a Christian staff,
and when I ask him the way to the passport-
office, he magnanimously retrains from
ejaculating anything about Fee-fo-Fum, or smelling
the blood of an Englishman, and instead
of eating me up alive on the spot, or grinding
my bones to make his bread, he tells me, in a