arrive. It seems that the place interests
people, and that there is a sort of novelty in staying in such a
deserted corner of the world, for they were in a perpetual state of mild
amusement at being here at all. Irais is the only one left. She is a
young woman with a beautiful, refined face, and her eyes and straight,
fine eyebrows are particularly lovable. At meals she dips her bread
into the salt-cellar, bites a bit off, and repeats the process, although
providence (taking my shape) has caused salt-spoons to be placed
at convenient intervals down the table. She lunched to-day on beer,
Schweine-koteletten, and cabbage-salad with caraway seeds in it, and now
I hear her through the open window, extemporising touching melodies
in her charming, cooing voice. She is thin, frail, intelligent, and
lovable, all on the above diet. What better proof can be needed to
establish the superiority of the Teuton than the fact that after such
meals he can produce such music? Cabbage salad is a horrid invention,
but I don't doubt its utility as a means of encouraging thoughtfulness;
nor will I quarrel with it, since it results so poetically, any more
than I quarrel with the manure that results in roses, and I give it to
Irais every day to make her sing. She is the sweetest singer I have ever
heard, and has a charming trick of making up songs as she goes along.
When she begins, I go and lean out of the window and look at my little
friends out there in the borders while listening to her music, and feel
full of pleasant sadness and regret. It is so sweet to be sad when one
has nothing to be sad about.

The April baby came panting up just as I had written that, the others
hurrying along behind, and with flaming cheeks displayed for my
admiration three brand-new kittens, lean and blind, that she was
carrying in her pinafore, and that had just been found motherless in the
woodshed.

"Look," she cried breathlessly, "such a much!"

I was glad it was only kittens this time, for she had been once before
this afternoon on purpose, as she informed me, sitting herself down on
the grass at my feet, to ask about the lieber Gott, it being Sunday and
her pious little nurse's conversation having run, as it seems, on heaven
and angels.

Her questions about the lieber Gott are better left unrecorded, and I
was relieved when she began about the angels.

"What do they wear for clothes?" she asked in her German-English.

"Why, you've seen them in pictu