Perhaps a four-line sermon in a Saturday paper is the sufficient German equivalent of the eight or ten columns of sermons which the New-Yorkers get in their Monday morning papers.  The latest news (two days old) follows the four-line sermon, under the pica headline “Telegrams”—­these are “telegraphed” with a pair of scissors out of the Augsburger ZEITUNG of the day before.  These telegrams consist of fourteen and two-thirds lines from Berlin, fifteen lines from Vienna, and two and five-eights lines from Calcutta.  Thirty-three small-pica lines news in a daily journal in a King’s Capital of one hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants is surely not an overdose.  Next we have the pica heading, “News of the Day,” under which the following facts are set forth:  Prince Leopold is going on a visit to Vienna, six lines; Prince Arnulph is coming back from Russia, two lines; the Landtag will meet at ten o’clock in the morning and consider an election law, three lines and one word over; a city government item, five and one-half lines; prices of tickets to the proposed grand Charity Ball, twenty-three lines—­for this one item occupies almost one-fourth of the entire first page; there is to be a wonderful Wagner concert in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, with an orchestra of one hundred and eight instruments, seven and one-half lines.  That concludes the first page.  Eighty-five lines, altogether, on that page, including three headlines.  About fifty of those lines, as one perceives, deal with local matters; so the reporters are not overworked.

Exactly one-half of the second page is occupied with an opera criticism, fifty-three lines (three of them being headlines), and “Death Notices,” ten lines.

The other half of the second page is made up of two paragraphs under the head of “Miscellaneous News.”  One of these paragraphs tells about a quarrel between the Czar of Russia and his eldest son, twenty-one and a half lines; and the other tells about the atrocious destruction of a peasant child by its parents, forty lines, or one-fifth of the total of the reading-matter contained in the paper.

Consider what a fifth part of the reading-matter of an American daily paper issued in a city of one hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants amounts to!  Think what a mass it is.  Would any one suppose I could so snugly tuck away such a mass in a chapter of this book that it would be difficult to find it again in the reader lost his place?  Surely not.  I will translate that child-murder word for word, to give the reader a realizing sense of what a fifth part of the reading-matter of a Munich daily actually is when it comes under measurement of the eye: