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."

Admirable schools they all were, the presence of the spiked helmet
notwithstanding, and crowning them in the great Prussian educational
system came the famous universities. That at Berlin counted its
students by thousands, its professors by hundreds. There was no branch
of human knowledge without its teacher. One could study Egyptian
hieroglyphics or the Assyrian arrow-head inscriptions. A new pimple
could hardly break out on the blotched face of the moon, without
a lecture from a professor next day to explain the theory of its
development. The poor earthquakes were hardly left to shake in peace
an out-of-the-way strip of South American coast or Calabrian plain,
but a German professor violated their privacy, undertook to see whence
they came and whither they went, and even tried to predict when they
would go to shaking again. The vast building of the University stood