of four hundred. It was read two weeks later by one of the professors.

On December 15 we had our reunion and celebration of it all. Carl took
the Amerika, second class, at Hamburg; the boys and I at Southampton,
ushered thither from Swanage and put aboard the steamer by our faithful
Onkel Keck, son of the folk with whom Carl had stayed in Heidelberg, who
came all the way from London for that purpose. It was not such a brash
Herr Doktor that we found, after all: the Channel had begun to tell on
him, as it were, and while it was plain that he loved us, it was also
plain that he did not love the water. So we gave him his six days off,
and he lay anguish-eyed in a steamer-chair while I covered fifty-seven
miles a day, tearing after two sons who were far more filled with
Wanderlust than they had been three years before. When our dad did feel
chipper again, he felt very chipper, and our last four days were
perfect.

We landed in New York on Christmas Eve, in a snowstorm; paid the
crushing sum of one dollar and seventy-five cents duty,--such a jovial
agent as inspected our belongings I never beheld; he must already have
had just the Christmas present he most wanted, whatever it was. When he
heard that we had been in Heidelberg, he and several other officials
began a lusty rendering of "Old Heidelberg,"--and within an hour we were
speeding toward California, a case of certified milk added to our
already innumerable articles of luggage. Christmas dinner we ate on the
train. How those American dining-car prices floored us after three years
of all we could eat for thirty-five cents!