and the bronze of the statue, hollow and worn away by rust (I have even
noticed holes), cannot resist very much, especially after a blow with
the sharp hatchet. I have put my papers in order, for the benefit of
the Government which has sent me hither. I am sorry to have defrauded
them of their "History of Urbania." To pass the endless day and calm
the fever of impatience, I have just taken a long walk. This is the
coldest day we have had. The bright sun does not warm in the least, but
seems only to increase the impression of cold, to make the snow on the
mountains glitter, the blue air to sparkle like steel. The few people
who are out are muffled to the nose, and carry earthenware braziers
beneath their cloaks; long icicles hang from the fountain with the
figure of Mercury upon it; one can imagine the wolves trooping down
through the dry scrub and beleaguering this town. Somehow this cold
makes me feel wonderfully calm--it seems to bring back to me my
boyhood.

As I walked up the rough, steep, paved alleys, slippery with frost, and
with their vista of snow mountains against the sky, and passed by the
church steps strewn with box and laurel, with the faint smell of
incense coming out, there returned to me--I know not why--the
recollection, almost the sensation, of those Christmas Eves long ago at
Posen and Breslau, when I walked as a child along the wide streets,
peeping into the windows where they were beginning to light the tapers
of the Christmas-trees, and wondering whether I too, on returning home,
should be let into a wonderful room all blazing with lights and gilded
nuts and glass beads. They are hanging the last strings of those blue
and red metallic beads, fastening on the last gilded and silvered
walnuts on the trees out there at home in the North; they are lighting
the blue and red tapers; the wax is beginning to run on to the
beautiful spruce green branches; the children are waiting with beating