learned not to annoy himself on this account. His difficulties
with the language gradually ceased. He thought himself quite
Germanized in 1859. He even deluded himself with the idea that he
read it as though it were English, which proved that he knew
little about it; but whatever success he had in his own
experiment interested him less than his contact with German
education.

He had revolted at the American school and university; he had
instantly rejected the German university; and as his last
experience of education he tried the German high school. The
experiment was hazardous. In 1858 Berlin was a poor, keen-witted,
provincial town, simple, dirty, uncivilized, and in most respects
disgusting. Life was primitive beyond what an American boy could
have imagined. Overridden by military methods and bureaucratic
pettiness, Prussia was only beginning to free her hands from
internal bonds. Apart from discipline, activity scarcely existed.
The future Kaiser Wilhelm I, regent for his insane brother King
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, seemed to pass his time looking at the
passers-by from the window of his modest palace on the Linden.
German manners, even at Court, were sometimes brutal, and German
thoroughness at school was apt to be routine. Bismarck himself
was then struggling to begin a career against the inertia of the
German system. The condition of Germany was a scandal and
nuisance to every earnest German, all whose energies were turned
to reforming it from top to bottom; and Adams walked into a great
public school to get educated, at precisely the time when the
Germans wanted most to get rid of the education they were forced
to follow. As an episode in the search for education, this
adventure smacked of Heine.