By these surface indications alone the most inexperienced traveler would know he had reached Germany, even without the halt at the custom house on the border; or the crossing watchman in trim uniform jumping to attention at every roadcrossing; or the beautifully upholstered, handswept state forests; or the hedges of willow trees along the brooks, sticking up their stubby, twiggy heads like so many disreputable hearth-brooms; or the young grain stretching in straight rows crosswise of the weedless fields and looking, at a distance, like fair green-printed lines evenly spaced on a wide brown page.  Also, one observes everywhere surviving traces that are unmistakable of the reign of that most ingenious and wideawake of all the earlier rulers of Germany, King Verboten the Great.

In connection with the life and works of this distinguished ruler is told an interesting legend well worthy of being repeated here.  It would seem that King Verboten was the first crowned head of Europe to learn the value of keeping his name constantly before the reading public.  Rameses the Third of Egypt—­that enterprising old constant advertiser who swiped the pyramids of all his predecessors and had his own name engraved thereon—­had been dead for many centuries and was forgotten when Verboten mounted the throne, and our own Teddy Roosevelt would not be born for many centuries yet to come; so the idea must have occurred to King Verboten spontaneously, as it were.  Therefore he took counsel with himself, saying: 

“I shall now erect statues to myself.  Dynasties change and wars rage, and folks grow fickle and tear down statues.  None of that for your Uncle Dudley K. Verboten!  No; this is what I shall do:  On every available site in the length and breadth of this my realm I shall stick up my name; and, wherever possible, near to it I shall engrave or paint the names of my two favorite sons, Ausgang and Eingang—­to the end that, come what may, we shall never be forgotten in the land of our birth.”

And then he went and did it; and it was a thorough job—­so thorough a job that, to this good year of our Lord you may still see the name of that wise king everywhere displayed in Germany—­on railroad stations and in railroad trains; on castle walls and dead walls and brewery walls, and the back fence of the Young Ladies’ High School.  And nearly always, too, you will find hard by, over doors and passageways, the names of his two sons, each accompanied or underscored by the heraldic emblem of their house—­a barbed and feathered arrow pointing horizontally.

And so it was that King Verboten lived happily ever after and in the fullness of time died peacefully in his bed, surrounded by his wives, his children and his courtiers; and all of them sorrowed greatly and wept, but the royal signpainter sorrowed most of all.