Here I sit back, and words fail me. I see that year as a kaleidoscope of
one joyful day after another, each rushing by and leaving the memory
that we both always had, of the most perfect year that was ever given to
mortals on earth. I remember our eighth wedding anniversary in Berkeley.
We had been going night after night until we were tired of going
anywhere,--engagements seemed to have heaped up,--so we decided that the
very happiest way we could celebrate that most-to-be-celebrated of all
dates was just to stay at home, plug the telephone, pull down the
blinds, and have an evening by ourselves. Then we got out everything
that we kept as mementos of our European days, and went over them--all
the postcards, memory-books, theatre and opera programmes, etc., and,
lastly, read my diary--I had kept a record of every day in Europe. When
we came to that year in Heidelberg, we just could not believe our own
eyes. How had we ever managed to pack a year so full, and live to tell
the tale? I wish I could write a story of just that year. We swore an
oath in Berlin that we would make Heidelberg mean Germany to us--no
English-speaking, no Americans. As far as it lay in our power, we lived
up to it. Carl and I spoke only German to each other and to the
children, and we shunned our fellow countrymen as if they had had the
plague. And Carl, in the characteristic way he had, set out to fill our
lives with all the real German life we could get into them, not waiting
for that life to come of itself--which it might never have done.

One afternoon, on his way home from the University, he discovered in a
back alley the Weiser Boch, a little restaurant and beer-hall so full of
local color that it "hollered." No, it did not holler: it was too real
for that. It was sombre and carved up--it whispered. Carl made immediate
friends, in the way he had, with the portly Frau and Herr who ran the
Weiser Boch: they desired to meet me, they desired to see the Kinder,