At eleven-thirty or thereabout the show at the ice palace is over —­concluding with a push-ball match between teams of husky maidens who were apparently born on skates and raised on skates, and would not feel natural unless they were curveting about on skates.  Their skates seem as much a part of them as tails to mermaids.  It is bedtime now for sane folks, but at this moment a certain madness which does not at all fit in with the true German temperament descends on the crowd.  Some go upstairs to another part of the building, where there is a dancehall called the Admiralskasino; but, to the truly swagger, one should hasten to the Palais du Danse on the second floor of the big Metropolpalast in the Behrenstrasse.  This place opens promptly at midnight and closes promptly at two o’clock in the morning.

Inasmuch as the Palais du Danse is an institution borrowed outright from the French they have adopted a typically French custom here.  As the visitor enters—­if he be a stranger—­a flunky in gorgeous livery intercepts him and demands an entrance fee amounting to about a dollar and a quarter in our money, as I recall.  This tariff the American or Englishman pays, but the practiced Berliner merely suggests to the doorkeeper the expediency of his taking a long running start and jumping off into space, and stalks defiantly in without forking over a single pfennig to any person whatsoever.

The Palais du Danse is incomparably the most beautiful ballroom in the world—­so people who have been all over the world agree —­and it is spotlessly clean and free from brackish smells, which is more than can be said of any French establishment of similar character I have seen.  At the Palais du Danse the patron sits at a table—­a table with something on it besides a cloth being an essential adjunct to complete enjoyment of an evening of German revelry; and as he sits and drinks he listens to the playing of a splendid band and looks on at the dancing.  Nothing is drunk except wine—­and by wine I mainly mean champagne of the most sweetish and sickish brand obtainable.  Elsewhere, for one-twentieth the cost, the German could have the best and purest beer that is made; but he is out now for the big night.  Accordingly he saturates his tissues with the sugary bubble-water of France.  He does not join in the dancing himself.  The men dancers are nearly all paid dancers, I think, and the beautifully clad women who dance are either professionals, too, or else belong to a profession that is older even than dancing is.  They all dance with a profound German gravity and precision.  Here is music to set a wooden leg a-jigging; but these couples circle and glide and dip with an incomprehensible decorum and slowness.

When we were there, they were dancing the tango or one of its manifold variations.  All Europe, like all America, was, for the moment, tango mad.  While we were in Paris, M. Jean Richepin lectured before the Forty Immortals of the Five Academies assembled in solemn conclave at the Institute of France.  They are called the Forty Immortals because nobody can remember the names of more than five of them.  He took for his subject the tango—­his motto, in short, being one borrowed from the conductors in the New York subway—­“Mind your step!”