summer--we left Nandy with a kind-hearted neighbor, and away we spreed
to Boston, to the matinée and something good to eat.

Then, whoever would have imagined for a moment that the next year we
would be celebrating in Berlin--dinner at the Café Rheingold, with wine!
The fourth anniversary was at Heidelberg--one of the red-letter days, as
I look back upon those magic years. We left home early, with our lunch,
which we ate on a bed of dry leaves in a fairy birch forest back--and a
good ways up--in the Odenwald. Then we walked and walked--almost
twenty-five miles all told--through little forest hamlets, stopping now
and then at some small inn along the roadside for a cheese sandwich or
a glass of beer. By nightfall we reached Neckarsteinach and the
railroad, and prowled around the twisted narrow streets till train-time,
gazing often at our beloved Dilsberg crowning the hilltop across the
river, her ancient castle tower and town walls showing black against the
starlight. The happiness, the foreign untouristed wonder of that day!

Our fifth anniversary was another red-letter day--one of the days that
always made me feel, in looking back on it, that we must have been
people in a novel, an English novel; that it could not really have been
Carl and I who walked that perfect Saturday from Swanage to Studland.
But it was our own two joyous souls who explored that quaint English
thatched-roof, moss-covered corner of creation; who poked about the wee
old mouldy church and cemetery; who had tea and muffins and jam out
under an old gnarled apple tree behind a thatched-roof cottage. What a
wonder of a day it was! And indeed it was my Carl and I who walked the
few miles home toward sunset, swinging hands along the downs, and fairly
speechless with the glory of five years married and England and our
love. I should like to be thinking of that day just before I die. It was
so utterly perfect, and so ours.