But, as I have said, the Hofbräuhaus is no playroom for amateurs. My advice to you, if you would sip the cream of Munich and leave the hot acids and lye, is that you have yourself hauled forthwith to the Hoftheatre Café, and that you there tackle a modest seidel of Spatenbräu--first one, and then another, and so on until you master the science.
And all that I ask in payment for that tip--the most valuable, perhaps, you have ever got from a book--is that you make polite inquiry of the Herr Wirt regarding Fräulein Sophie, and that you present to her, when she comes tripping to your table, the respects and compliments of one who forgets not her cerulean eyes, her swanlike glide, her Mona Lisa smile and her leucemic and superbly manicured hands!
I am back again, back again in New York. My rooms are littered with battered bags and down-at-the-heel walking sticks and still-damp steamer rugs, lying where they dropped from the hands of maudlin bellboys. My trunks are creaking their way down the hall, urged on by a perspiring, muttering porter. The windows, still locked and gone blue-grey with the August heat, rattle to the echo of the "L" trains a block away, trains rankling up to Harlem with a sweating, struggling people, the people of the Republic, their day's grind over, jamming their one way to a thousand flat houses, there to await, in an all unconscious poverty, the sunrise of still such another day. The last crack of a triphammer, peckering at a giant pile of iron down the block, dies out on the dead air. A taxicab, rrrrr-ing in the street below, grunts its horn. A newsboy, in neuralgic yowl, bawls out a sporting extra. Another "L" train and the panes rattle again. A momentary quiet ... and from somewhere in a nearby street I hear a grind-organ. What is the tune it is playing? I've heard it, I know--somewhere; but--no, I can't remember. I try--I try to follow the air--but no use. And then, presently, one of the notes whispers into my puckering lips a single word--"_Mariechen_." Then other notes whisper others--"_du süsses Viehchen_"; and then others still others--"_du bist mein alles, bist mein Traum_." And the battered bags and the down-at-the-heel walking sticks and the still-damp steamer rugs and the trunks creaking down the hallway and the rattle of the "L" trains fade out of my eyes and ears and again dear little Hulda is with me under the Linden trees--poor dear little Hulda who ever in the years to come shall bring back to me the starlit romance of youth--and again I feel her so soft hand in mine and again I hear her whisper the _auf wiederseh'n_ that was to be our last good-bye--and I am three thousand miles over the seas. For it's night for me again in Berlin--_kronprinzessin_ of the cities of the world.