Excursions into the country were the most delightful pleasures of the summer.  The shorter ones took us to the suburbs of the capital, and sometimes to Charlottenburg, where several of our acquaintances lived, and our guardian, Alexander Mendelssohn, had a country house with a beautiful garden, where there was never any lack of the owner’s children and grandchildren for playmates.  Sometimes we were allowed to go there with other boys.  We then had a few Groschen to get something at a restaurant, and were generally brought home in a Kremser carriage.  These carriages were to be found in a long row by the wall outside of the Brandenburg Gate or at the Palace in Charlottenburg or by the “Turkish tent”—­for at that time there were no omnibuses running to the decidedly rural neighbouring city.  Even when the carriages were arranged to carry ten or twelve persons there was but one horse, and it was these Rosinantes which probably gave rise to the following rhyme: 

                   “A Spandau wind,
                    A child of Berlin,
                    A Charlottenburg horse,
                    Are all not worth a pin.”

The Berlin children were, on the whole, better than their reputation, but not so the Charlottenburg horses.  The Kremser carriages were named from the man who owned most of them.  The business was carried on by an association.  A single individual rarely hired one; either a family took possession of it, or you got in and waited patiently till enough persons had collected for the driver to think it worth while to take his whip and say, “Well, get up!”

But this same Herr Kremser also had nice carriages for excursions into the country, drawn by two or four horses, as might be required.  For the four-horse Kremser chariots there was even a driver in jockey costume, who rode the saddle-horse.

Other excursions took us to the beautiful Humboldt’s Tegel, to the Muggel and Schlachten Lakes, to Franzosisch Buchholz, Treptow, and Stralau.  We were, unfortunately, never allowed to attend the celebrated fishing festival at Stralau.

But the crowning expedition of all was on our mother’s birthday, either to the Pichelsbergen, wooded hills mirrored in ponds where fish abounded, or to the Pfaueninsel at Potsdam.

The country around Berlin is considered hopelessly ugly, but with great injustice.  I have convinced myself since that I do not look back as fondly on the Pichelsbergen and the Havelufer at Potsdam, where it was granted us to pass such happy hours in the springtime of life, because the force of imagination has clothed them with fancied charms.  No, these places have indeed a singularly peaceful attractiveness, and if I prefer them, as a child of the century, to real mountains, there was a time when the artist’s eye would have given them the preference over the grand landscapes of the Alpine world.