German colony there. With a delicatessen store on one side of him and a
man who played the flute on the other, he felt hardly at all
expatriated. The public house on the corner serves excellent
_Rheingold_, and on winter evenings Friedrich and Minna would sit by the
stove at the back of the drugstore with a jug of amber on the table and
dream of Stuttgart.

It did not take me long to find out that apothecary Schulz was an
educated man. At the rear of the store hung two diplomas of which he was
very proud. One was a certificate from the Stuttgart Oberrealschule; the
other his license to practise homicidal pharmacy in the German Empire,
dated 1880. He had read the "Kritik der reinen Vernunft", and found it
more interesting than Henry James, he told me. Julia and I used to drop
into his shop of an evening for a mug of hot chocolate, and always fell
into talk. His Minna, a frail little woman with a shawl round her
shoulders, would come out into the store and talk to us, too, and their
pet dachshund would frolic at our feet. They were a quaint couple, she
so white and shy and fragile; he ruddy, sturdy, and positive.

It was not till I told him of my years spent at a German University that
he really showed me the life that lay behind his shopman activity. We
sometimes talked German together, and he took me into their little
sitting room to see his photographs of home scenes at Stuttgart. It was
over thirty years since he had seen German soil, but still his eyes
would sparkle at the thought. He and Minna, being childless, dreamed of
a return to the Fatherland as their great end in life.

What an alluring place the little drugstore was! I was fascinated by the
rows and rows of gleaming bottles labelled with mysterious Latin
abbreviations. There were cases of patent remedies--Mexican Mustang