from, seeing that up to now, though you're such a perfect listener, you
haven't developed any particular talent for playing anything, have you
mother darling; and poor Dad positively preferred to be in a room where
music wasn't. Do you remember how he used to say he couldn't think
which end of a violin the noises came out of, and whichever it was he
wished they wouldn't? But what a mercy, what a real mercy and solution
of our difficulties, that I've got this one thing that perhaps I shall
be able to do really well, I do thank God on my knees for this.

There are four other boarders here,--three Germans and one Swede, and
the Swede and two of the Germans are women; and five outside people
come in for the midday dinner every day, all Germans, and four of them
are men. They have what they call _Abonnementskarten_ for their
dinners, so much a month. Frau Berg keeps an Open Midday Table--it is
written up on a board on the street railing--and charges 1 mark 25
pfennigs a dinner if a month's worth of them is taken, and 1 mark 50
pfennigs if they're taken singly. So everybody takes the month's
worth, and it is going to be rather fun, I think. Today I was solemnly
presented to the diners, first collectively by Frau Berg as _Unser
junge englische Gast_, Mees--no, I can't write what she made of
Cholmondeley, but some day I'll pronounce it for you; and really it is
hard on her that her one English guest, who might so easily have been
Evans, or Dobbs, or something easy, should have a name that looks a
yard long and sounds an inch short--and then each of them to me singly
by name. They all made the most beautiful stiff bows. Some of them
are students, I gathered; some, I imagine, are staying here because
they have no homes,--wash-ups on the shores of life; some are clerks
who come in for dinner from their offices near by; and one, the oldest
of the men and the most deferred to, is a lawyer called Doctor
something. I suppose my being a stranger made them silent, for they