ered four
for us, fried. And the waiter brought four each. He probably declared
for years that all Americans always eat four fried eggs each and every
night for supper.

We headed for Leipzig at once, and there Carl unearthed the Pension
Schroeter on Sophien Platz. There we had two rooms and all the food we
could eat,--far too much for us to eat, and oh! so delicious,--for
fifty-five dollars a month for the entire family, although Jim hardly
ranked as yet, economically speaking, as part of the consuming public.
We drained Leipzig to the dregs--a good German idiom. Carl worked at his
German steadily, almost frantically, with a lesson every day along with
all his university work--a seven o'clock lecture by Buecher every morning
being the cheery start for the day, and we blocks and blocks from the
University. I think of Carl through those days with extra pride, though
it is hard to decide that I was ever prouder of him at one time than
another. But he strained and labored without ceasing at such an
uninspiring job. All his hard study that broken-hearted summer at
Freiburg had given him no single word of an economic vocabulary. In
Leipzig he listened hour by hour to the lectures of his German
professors, sometimes not understanding an important word for several
days, yet exerting every intellectual muscle to get some light in his
darkness. Then, for, hours each day and almost every evening, it was
grammar, grammar, grammar, till he wondered at times if all life meant
an understanding of the subjunctive. Then, little by little, rays of
hope. "I caught five words in ----'s lecture to-day!" Then it was ten,
then twenty. Never a lecture of any day did he miss.

We stole moments for joy along the way. First, of course, there was the
opera--grand opera at twenty-five cents a seat. How Wagner bored us at
first--except the parts here and there that we had known all our lives.
Neither of us had had any musical education to speak of; each of us got
great joy out of what we considered "good" music, but which was
evidently low-brow. And Wagner at first was too much for us. That night
in Leipzig we heard the "Walkuere!"--utterly aghast and rather impatient
at so much non-understandable noise. Then we would drop down to
"Carmen," "La Boheme," Hoffman's "Erzaeblung," and think, "This is life!"
Each night that we spared for a spree we sought out some beer-hall--as
unfrequented a one as possible, to get all the local color we could.

Onc