First Lines: Paul Heyse - Children of the World

In the Dorotheen Strasse, in the middle of the Latin quarter of Berlin, the modest, scholarlike colouring of which seems more and more likely to be washed out by the approach of fashionable civilization, there stood, a few years ago, a small two-storied house, narrow-chested, insignificant, and as it were initimidated by its broad-shouldered neighbours, though each year it received a wash of delicate pink flesh-colour, and had been quite lately ornamented by a new lightning conductor on its old worn gable.