for her. I say to the weather: "If you would only be cold or warm! But
you stay continually at freezing-point, and at this rate the matter
may long drag on." For the present my activity is limited to sending
out, far and wide, from the warm seat at the writing-table, diverse
conjurations, whose magic starts quantities of fascines, boards,
wheelbarrows, etc., from inland towards the Elbe, perchance to serve
as a prosaic dam in restraint of the poetical foaming of the flood.
After I had spent the morning in this useful rather than agreeable
correspondence, my resolve was to chat away comfortably through the
evening with you, beloved one, as though we were sitting on the sofa
in the red drawing-room; and with sympathetic attention to my desire
the mail kept for my enjoyment precisely at this gossiping hour your
letter, which I should have received by good rights day before
yesterday. You know, if you were able to decipher my inexcusably
scrawled note [3] from Schlawe, how I struck a half-drunken crowd of
hussar officers there, who disturbed me in my writing. In the train
I had, with my usual bad luck, a lady _vis-à-vis,_ and beside me two
very stout, heavily fur-clad passengers, the nearer of whom was a
direct descendant of Abraham into the bargain, and put me in a bitter
humor against all his race by a disagreeable movement of his left
elbow.

I found my brother in his dressing-gown, and he employed the five
minutes of our interview very completely, according to his habit, in
emptying a woolsack full of vexatious news about Kniephof before me:
disorderly inspectors, a lot of damaged sheep, distillers drunk every
day, thoroughbred colts (the prettiest, of course) come to grief, and
rotten potatoes, fell in a rolling torrent from his obligingly opened
mouth upon my somewhat travel-worn self. On my brother's account I
must affect and utter some exclamations of terror and complaint, for