ready, and somewhere there is one for me. Donnerwetter!  If they get into Prussia, they’ll find a tough old Landsturm!  Only let Vater Wilhelm turn his hand, and to-morrow close upon a million trained and well-armed troops could be stepping to the drum.”  It was an evening at the end of June.  Napoleon was having the finishing touches put to the new Opera House at Paris, thinking, so far as the world could tell, of nothing more important than how many imperial eagles it would do to put along the cornice.  King William was packing for Ems, designing to be back at the peaceful unveiling of his father’s statue the first week in August.  Bismarck was at his Pomeranian estate, in poor health, it was said, plotting nothing but to circumvent his bodily trouble.  In less than a month full-armed Prussia was on the march.  I could understand the readiness, when I thought of the spiked helmet I had seen in the Prussian home that quiet summer night.

The German Friedhof, or burying-ground, had never the extent or magnificence of some American cemeteries.  Even near the cities it was small and quiet, showing, however, in the well-kept mounds and stones there was no want of care.  Every old church, too, was floored with the memorial tablets of those buried beneath, and bare upon walls and columns monuments in the taste of the various ages that have come and gone since the church was built.  Graves of famous men, here as everywhere, were places of pilgrimage, and here as everywhere to see which are the most honoured tombs, was no bad way of judging the character of the people.  Among the scholars of Germany there have been no greater names than those of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, brothers not far apart in the cradle, not far apart in death, who lived and worked together their full threescore years and ten.  They were two wonderful old men, with faces—­as I saw them together in a photograph shown me by Hermann Grimm, the well-known son of Wilhelm—­full of intellectual strength, and yet with the sweetness and innocence of children.  They lie now side by side in the Matthaei Kirchhof at Berlin, in graves precisely similar, with a lovely rose-bush scattering petals impartially on the turf above both, and solid twin stones at their heads, meant to endure apparently as long as their fame.  Hither come a large and various company of pilgrims,—­children who love the brothers Grimm for their fairy-tales, young students who have been kindled by their example, and grey old scholars who respect their achievements as the most marvellous work of the marvellous German erudition.  The little North German city, Weimar, is closely associated with the great literary men of the last hundred years.  Here several of them accomplished their best work under the patronage of an enlightened duke, and finally found their graves.  An atmosphere of reverend quiet seemed to hang over it as I walked through its shaded streets,—­streets where there is never bustle, and which appear to be always remembering