"The nobility? Do they live in——"
"In this street? That is good! very good, indeed! I wish the Duke of Sassafras-Hagenstein could hear you say that. When the Duke first moved in here he——"
"Does he live in this street?"
"Him! Well, I should say so! Do you see the big, plain house over there with the placard in the third floor window? That's his house."
"The placard that says 'Furnished rooms to let'? Does he keep
boarders?"
"What an idea! Him! With a rent-roll of twelve hundred thousand
marks a year? Oh, positively this is too good."
"Well, what does he have that sign up for?"
The assistant took me by the buttonhole & said, with a merry light beaming in his eye:
"Why, my dear sir, a person would know you are new to Berlin just by your innocent questions. Our aristocracy, our old, real, genuine aristocracy, are full of the quaintest eccentricities, eccentricities inherited for centuries, eccentricities which they are prouder of than they are of their titles, and that sign-board there is one of them. They all hang them out. And it's regulated by an unwritten law. A baron is entitled to hang out two, a count five, a duke fifteen——"
"Then they are all dukes over on that side, I sup——"