Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/270

 MARK TWAIN

the wall, and of course you don t know just when the change happened.

The names are plainly marked on the corners on all the corners there are no exceptions. But the numbering of the houses there has never been any thing like it since original chaos. It is not possible that it was done by this wise city government. At first one thinks it was done by an idiot; but there is too much variety about it for that; an idiot could not think of so many different ways of making con fusion and propagating blasphemy. The numbers run up one side the street and down the other. That is endurable, but the rest isn t. They often use one number for three or four houses and sometimes they put the number on only one of the houses and let you guess at the others. Sometimes they put a number on a house 4, for instance then put 4a, 46, 4&amp;lt;;, on the succeeding houses, and one becomes old and decrepit before he finally arrives at 5. A result of this systemless system is that when you are at No. i in a street you haven t any idea how far it may be to No. 150; it may be only six or eight blocks, it may be a couple of miles. Frederick Street is long, and is one of the great thoroughfares. The other day a man put up his money behind the asser tion that there were more refreshment places in that street than numbers on the houses and he won. There were 254 numbers and 257 refreshment places. Yet as I have said, it is a long street.

But the worst feature of all this complex business is that in Berlin the numbers do not travel in any one direction; no, they travel along until they get

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