Not even in Paris did the tango experts compare with the tango experts one sees in America.  At this juncture I pause a moment, giving opportunity for some carping critic to rise and call my attention to the fact that perhaps the most distinguished of the early school of turkey-trotters bears a French name and came to us from Paris.  To which I reply that so he does and so he did; but I add then the counter-argument that he came to us by way of Paris, at the conclusion of a round trip that started in the old Fourth Ward of the Borough of Manhattan, city of Greater New York; for he was born and bred on the East Side—­and, moreover, was born bearing the name of a race of kings famous in the south of Ireland and along the Bowery.  And he learned his art—­not only the rudiments of it but the final finished polish of it—­in the dancehalls of Third Avenue, where the best slow-time dancers on earth come from.  It was after he had acquired a French accent and had Gallicized his name, thereby causing a general turning-over of old settlers in the graveyards of the County Clare, that he returned to us, a conspicuous figure in the world of art and fashion, and was able to get twenty-five dollars an hour for teaching the sons and daughters of our richest families to trip the light tanfastic go.  At the same time, be it understood, I am not here to muckrake the past of one so prominent and affluent in the most honored and lucrative of modern professions; but facts are facts, and these particular facts are quoted here to bind and buttress my claim that the best dancers are the American dancers.

After this digression let us hurry right back to that loyal Berliner whom we left seated in the Palais du Danse on the Behrenstrasse, waiting for the hour of two in the morning to come.  The hour of two in the morning does come; the lights die down; the dancers pick up their heavy feet—­it takes an effort to pick up those Continental feet—­and quit the waxen floor; the Oberkellner comes round with his gold chain of office dangling on his breast and collects for the wine, and our German friend, politely inhaling his yawns, gets up and goes elsewhere to finish his good time.  And, goldarn it, how he does dread it!  Yet he goes, faithful soul that he is.

He goes, let us say, to the Pavilion Mascotte—­no dancing, but plenty of drinking and music and food—­which opens at two and stays open until four, when it shuts up shop in order that another place in the nature of a cabaret may open.  And so, between five and six o’clock in the morning of the new day, when the lady garbagemen and the gentlemen chambermaids of the German capital are abroad on their several duties, he journeys homeward, and so, as Mr. Pepys says, to bed, with nothing disagreeable to look forward to except repeating the same dose all over again the coming night.  This sort of thing would kill anybody except a Prussian—­for, mark you, between intervals of drinking he has been eating all night; but then a Prussian has no digestion.  He merely has gross tonnage in the place where his digestive apparatus ought to be.