Admirable schools they all were, the presence of the spiked helmet notwithstanding, and crowning them in the great Prussian educational system came the famous universities.  That at Berlin counted its students by thousands, its professors by hundreds.  There was no branch of human knowledge without its teacher.  One could study Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Assyrian arrow-head inscriptions.  A new pimple could hardly break out on the blotched face of the moon, without a lecture from a professor next day to explain the theory of its development.  The poor earthquakes were hardly left to shake in peace an out-of-the-way strip of South American coast or Calabrian plain, but a German professor violated their privacy, undertook to see whence they came and whither they went, and even tried to predict when they would go to shaking again.  The vast building of the University stood on Unter den Linden, opposite the palace of the king.  Large as it was, its halls were crowded at the end of every hour by the thousand or two of young men, who presently disappeared within the lecture-rooms.  Here in past years had been Hegel and Fichte, the brothers Grimm, the brothers Humboldt, Niebuhr, and Carl Ritter.  Here in my time, were Lepsius and Curtius, Virchow and Hoffman, Ranke and Mommsen,—­the world’s first scholars in the past and present.  The student selected his lecturers, then went day by day through the semester to the plain lecture-rooms, taking notes diligently at benches which had been whittled well by his predecessors, and where he too most likely carved his own autograph and perhaps the name of the dear girl he adored,—­for Yankee boys have no monopoly of the jack-knife.

Where could one find the spiked helmet in the midst of the scholastic quiet and diligence of a German university?  It was visible enough in more ways than one.  Here was one manifestation.  Run down the long list of professors and teachers in the Anzeiger, and you would find somewhere in the list the Fechtmeister, instructor in fighting, master of the sword exercise, and he was pretty sure to be one of the busiest men in the company.  To most German students, a sword, or Schlaeger, was as necessary as pipe or beer-mug; not a slender fencing-foil, with a button on the point, and slight enough to snap with a vigorous thrust, but a stout blade of tempered steel, ground sharp.  With these weapons the students perpetrated savageries, almost unrebuked, which struck an American with horror.  Duels were of frequent occurrence, taking place sometimes at places and on days regularly set apart for the really bloody work.  The fighters were partially protected by a sort of armour, and the wounds inflicted were generally more ghastly than dangerous; though a son of Bismarck was said to have been nearly killed at Bonn a few years before, and there was sometimes serious maiming.  Perhaps one may say it was nothing but very rough play, but it was the play of young