After so formidable a list of what one can’t find in a German daily, the question may well be asked, What can be found in it?  It is easily answered:  A child’s handful of telegrams, mainly about European national and international political movements; letter-correspondence about the same things; market reports.  There you have it.  That is what a German daily is made of.  A German daily is the slowest and saddest and dreariest of the inventions of man.  Our own dailies infuriate the reader, pretty often; the German daily only stupefies him.  Once a week the German daily of the highest class lightens up its heavy columns—­that is, it thinks it lightens them up—­with a profound, an abysmal, book criticism; a criticism which carries you down, down, down into the scientific bowels of the subject—­for the German critic is nothing if not scientific—­and when you come up at last and scent the fresh air and see the bonny daylight once more, you resolve without a dissenting voice that a book criticism is a mistaken way to lighten up a German daily.  Sometimes, in place of the criticism, the first-class daily gives you what it thinks is a gay and chipper essay—­about ancient Grecian funeral customs, or the ancient Egyptian method of tarring a mummy, or the reasons for believing that some of the peoples who existed before the flood did not approve of cats.  These are not unpleasant subjects; they are not uninteresting subjects; they are even exciting subjects —­until one of these massive scientists gets hold of them.  He soon convinces you that even these matters can be handled in such a way as to make a person low-spirited.

As I have said, the average German daily is made up solely of correspondences—­a trifle of it by telegraph, the rest of it by mail.  Every paragraph has the side-head, “London,” “Vienna,” or some other town, and a date.  And always, before the name of the town, is placed a letter or a sign, to indicate who the correspondent is, so that the authorities can find him when they want to hang him.  Stars, crosses, triangles, squares, half-moons, suns —­such are some of the signs used by correspondents.

Some of the dailies move too fast, others too slowly.  For instance, my Heidelberg daily was always twenty-four hours old when it arrived at the hotel; but one of my Munich evening papers used to come a full twenty-four hours before it was due.

Some of the less important dailies give one a tablespoonful of a continued story every day; it is strung across the bottom of the page, in the French fashion.  By subscribing for the paper for five years I judge that a man might succeed in getting pretty much all of the story.