ismarck was still looked on as a dangerous
upstart, and we reckoned in kreutzers; blue and white Austrian bands
played at Mainz and Frankfurt. It was long ago that I was, so to speak,
a small German infant, fed on Teutonic romance and sentiment (and also
funny Teutonic prosaicalness, bless it!) by a dim procession of
Germania's daughters. There was Franziska, who could boast a Rhineland
pastor for grandfather, a legendary pastor bearding Napoleon; Franziska,
who read Schiller's "Maria Stuart" and "Joan of Arc," and even his
"Child Murderess" (I remember every word of obloquy hurled at the
hangman--"hangman, craven hangman, canst thou not break off a lily") to
the housemaid and me whenever my father and mother went out of an
evening; and described "Papagena," in Mozart's opera which she had seen,
all dressed in feathers; and was tempted to strum furtive melancholy
chords on my mother's zither.... Dear Franziska, whose comfortable
blond good looks inspired the enamoured upholsterer in letters beginning
"My dearest little goldfish"--Franziska, what has become of thee? And
the Frau Professor, who averred with rhythmic iteration that teaching
such a child was far, far worse than breaking stones on a high-road; in
what stony regions may she have found an honoured stony grave? What has
become of genial Mme. E., who played the Jupiter Symphonie with my
mother, instead of hearing me through my scales, and lent me volumes of
Tonkuenstler-Lexikons to soothe her conscience, and gave us honey in the
comb out of her garden of verbena and stocks? But best of all, dearest,
far above all the others, and quite different, Marie S., charming
enthusiastic young schoolmistress in that little town of pepper-pot
towers and covered bridges, you I have found again; I shall soon see
your eyes and hear your voice, quite unchanged, I am certain. And we
shall sit and talk (your big daughter listening, perhaps not without an
occasional smile) about those hours which you and I, a girl of twenty
and a child of eleven, spent in the little room above the rushing Alpine
river, eating apples and drinking _cafe au lait_; hours in which a
whole world of legend and poetry, and scientific fact and theory more
wonderful still, passed from your ardent young mind into the little
eager puzzled one of your loving pupil. We shall meet very soon, a
little awkwardly at first, perhaps, but after a moment talking as if no
silence of thirty years had ever parted us; as if