right path; but a week's experience left him dazed and dull.
Faith held out, but the paths grew dim. Berlin astonished him,
but he had no lack of friends to show him all the amusement it
had to offer. Within a day or two he was running about with the
rest to beer-cellars and music-halls and dance-rooms, smoking bad
tobacco, drinking poor beer, and eating sauerkraut and sausages
as though he knew no better. This was easy. One can always
descend the social ladder. The trouble came when he asked for the
education he was promised. His friends took him to be registered
as a student of the university; they selected his professors and
courses; they showed him where to buy the Institutes of Gaius and
several German works on the Civil Law in numerous volumes; and
they led him to his first lecture.

His first lecture was his last. The young man was not very
quick, and he had almost religious respect for his guides and
advisers; but he needed no more than one hour to satisfy him that
he had made another failure in education, and this time a fatal
one. That the language would require at least three months' hard
work before he could touch the Law was an annoying discovery; but
the shock that upset him was the discovery of the university
itself. He had thought Harvard College a torpid school, but it
was instinct with life compared with all that he could see of the
University of Berlin. The German students were strange animals,
but their professors were beyond pay. The mental attitude of the
university was not of an American world. What sort of instruction
prevailed in other branches, or in science, Adams had no occasion
to ask, but in the Civil Law he found only the lecture system in
its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century.
The professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed