A pleasant custom in Berlin, as in London, is window-gardening—windows constructed so on purpose, the glass projecting a couple of feet beyond the side of the house, forming attractive ferneries, wherein are contained various sorts of cryptogami, as well as flowers in bloom, needing but little attention, as the moisture evaporating from the soil, etc., having no way of escaping, is taken up by the leaves. Also at the entrance to houses I have noticed beautiful dwarf apple-trees, with glossy leaves, and bearing an abundance of diminutive fruit. On one of these little trees, yesterday, I counted fifty-three ripe apples. These on the pavement day and night, and just the height of a boy’s hand in passing, notwithstanding what I had observed about fenceless orchards, made me suspect them apples of Sodom, or they certainly would have been plucked. To satisfy curiosity, I called on a florist having some for sale, and found that they tasted as good as they looked. I have concluded, therefore, that if Adam and Eve had been Germans there would have been no Fall; and I know no race doing more towards having Eden restored than these same people.
[ A RAMBLE IN PRUSSIA.]
STEPHEN POWERS.
[Country life in Prussia is well delineated in the following description of a journey on foot from Wittenberg to Potsdam. It is not an alluring picture, and brings us into the presence of a stolid generation such as would scarcely be looked for in the rural districts of that active realm.]
Once out of Wittenberg, I journeyed on along the ancient royal highway, between the ever-welcome colonnades of stately poplars, planted that the royal head might never be scorched by the too ardent sun of summer. The sun shone as brightly as it ever does in blue old Germany, but what a weary, weary land to my eyes, on the pitiless cold May-day, was that sandy champaign, almost utterly naked in its hopeless sterility, and diversified only now and then by a bald-headed knoll, swelling broadly up with a thousand acres! So indescribably blue and cold and pinched was it, without any vegetation but a forest of cultivated pines, which, after a quarter of a century, had struggled up with their wretched, scraggy stems only fifteen feet! The very soil looked blue and thin and skinny, and the rye looked blue, and so meagre and chilled that it could not conceal the ground or the knees of the men who plucked up the weeds.
All the dismal immensity of this fenceless, hedgeless, houseless waste, except an acre of rye in a thousand, was given up to the sorrel, the lichens, and the quitches. The very air seemed poor and attenuated like thin skimmed milk. All the houses were clustered together in little villages far apart, where they huddled close, as if for warmth; the dead, dull peat-fires gave forth no cheerful wreathing smoke; and in all the desolate waste there was scarcely a soul abroad. The faces of the yellow-haired children, who were occasionally watching some geese, were mottled with blue and purple and goose-pimples, and if a man ventured abroad to pluck up weeds in the stunted rye, which seemed to shiver with a kind of rustling, starved chilliness, his hands were bluer than the air. So utterly worn out, so bluish-wan and starved with the lapse of untold centuries, seemed all the earth and the air of that Germany which I looked out upon on that dismal May forenoon.
Lamartine says the blood of the Germans is blue, but that of these Brandenburgers must certainly be sour.
It will readily be believed that I did not undertake a pilgrimage through this inexpressibly bleak region in pursuit of fine landscapes. I wished only to visit, by their own firesides and in their own fields, that sturdy, grim, Puritanic race of Brandenburgers, to whom Prussia is primarily indebted for all her greatness.