d up
behind, and he rolled away to his dinner, I stood leaning against a
pillar, and reflected if it could be possible that that religion
could be anything but genuine which had so much genuine ermine. And
the organ-notes, rolling down the arches, seemed to me to have a very
ultramontane sound.

CHANGING QUARTERS

Perhaps it may not interest you to know how we moved, that is,
changed our apartments. I did not see it mentioned in the cable
dispatches, and it may not be generally known, even in Germany; but
then, the cable is so occupied with relating how his Serenity this,
and his Highness that, and her Loftiness the other one, went outdoors
and came in again, owing to a slight superfluity of the liquid
element in the atmosphere, that it has no time to notice the real
movements of the people. And yet, so dry are some of these little
German newspapers of news, that it is refreshing to read, now and
then, that the king, on Sunday, walked out with the Duke of Hesse
after dinner (one would like to know if they also had sauerkraut and
sausage), and that his prospective mother-in-law, the Empress of
Russia, who was here the other day, on her way home from Como, where
she was nearly drowned out by the inundation, sat for an hour on
Sunday night, after the opera, in the winter garden of the palace,
enjoying the most easy family intercourse.

But about moving. Let me tell you that to change quarters in the
face of a Munich winter, which arrives here the 1st of November, is
like changing front to the enemy just before a battle; and if we had
perished in the attempt, it might have been put upon our monuments,
as it is upon the out-of-cannon-cast obelisk in the Karolina Platz,
erected to the memory of the thirty thousand Bavarian soldiers who
fell in the disastrous Russian winter campaign of Napoleon, fighting
against all the interests of Germany,--"they, too, died for their
Fatherland." Bavaria happened also to fight on the wrong side at
Sadowa and I suppose that those who fell there also died for
Fatherland: it is a way the Germans have of doing, and they mean
nothing serious by it. But, as I was saying, to change quarters here
as late as November is a little difficult, for the wise ones seek to
get housed for the winter by October: they select the sunny
apartments, get on the double windows, and store up wood. The plants
are tied up in the gardens, the fountains are covered over, and the
inhabitants go about in furs an