Publisher's Synopsis
About nine o'clock on a dark April evening in the year 1866, a Berlin cab drove up the Wilhelmsstrasse with the trot peculiar to those vehicles, and stopped between the two lamps illuminating the door of No. 76, the house of the Minister for Foreign Affairs. The ground floor of this long two-storeyed house was well lighted up, and any one who peeped through the green blinds could see into many office-like rooms, well-filled with industrious writers, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour. The windows of the upper storey were only faintly lighted here and there. From the cab which drew up before this house stepped a middle-sized man, dressed in a dark paletot and black hat; he came close to the gas-lamp to look in his purse for the right coins with which to pay the fare, and as soon as he had settled with the numbered Automedon he rang loudly at the door-bell. The door opened almost immediately, and the person demanding admittance entered a spacious porte-cochere, at the end of which, between two large sleeping stone lions, ascended the flight of steps leading to the interior of the house. On one side of the doorway a window opened into the porter's lodge, and at the window appeared the porter's face, wearing that peculiarly stolid expression common to the door-keepers of all great houses."
