incongruity rather than gravely blamed.  A row of cheap pictures hung side by side upon the wall.  First Luther, the rougher characteristics of the well-known portrait somewhat exaggerated.  The shoulders were even larger than common.  The bony buttresses of the forehead over the eyes, too, as they rose above the strong lower face, were emphasised, looking truly as though, if tongue and pen failed to make a way, the shoulders could push one, and, if worse came to worst, the head would butt one.  Next to Luther was a head of Christ; then in the same line, with nothing in the position or quality of the pictures to indicate that the subjects were any less esteemed, a row of royal personages, whose military trappings were made particularly plain.  It was all characteristic enough.  The Reformer’s figure stood for the stalwart Protestantism of the Prussian character, still living and militant in a way hard for us to imagine; the portraits of the royal soldiers stood for its combative loyalty, ready to meet anything for king and fatherland; and the head of Christ for its zealous faith, which, however it may have cooled away among some classes of the people, was still intense in the nation at large.  I visited the best school for girls in Berlin, and it was singular to find the spiked helmet, among those retiring maidens even, and this time not hung upon the wall nor outside in the yard.  The teacher of the most interesting class I visited—­a class in German literature—­was a man of forty-five, of straight, soldierly bearing, a grey, martial moustache, and energetic eye.  He told me, as we walked together in the hall, waiting for the exercise to commence, that he had been a soldier, and it so happened that among the ballads in the lesson for that day was one in honour of the Prussian troops at Rossbach.  Over this the old soldier broke out into an animated lecture, which grew more and more earnest as he went forward; he showed how the idea of faithfulness to duty had become obscured, but was enforced again by the philosopher Kant in his teaching, and then brought into practice by the great Frederick.  The veteran plainly thought there was no duty higher than that owed to the schwarzer Adler, the black eagle of Prussia.  Then came an account of the French horse before Rossbach; how they rode out from Weimar, the troopers, before they went, ripping open the beds on which they had slept and scattering the feathers to the wind to plague the housewives,—­a piece of ruthlessness that came home thoroughly to the young housekeepers; then how der alte Fritz, lying in wait behind Janus Hill, with General Seydlitz and Field-marshal Keith, suddenly rushed out and put them all to rout.  The soldier was in a fever of patriotism and rage against the French before his description was finished, and the faces of the girls kindled in response.  “They will some time,” I thought, “be lovers, wives, mothers of Prussian soldiers themselves, and this training will keep alive in the home the national fire.”