e and solitude.

I sat down, having found a clean cup and plate, and glanced timidly at
the theemaschine, not daring to cope with its mysteries, until my doubts
were relieved by the entrance of a young person with a trim little
figure, a coquettishly cut and elaborately braided apron, and a white
frilled morgenhaube upon her hair, surmounting her round,
heavenward-aspiring visage.

"_Guten morgen, Fraeulein_," she said, as she marched up to the darkly
mysterious theemaschine and began deftly to prepare coffee for me, and
to push the Broedchen toward me. She began to talk to me in broken
English, which was very pretty, and while I ate and drank, she
industriously scraped little white roots at the same table. She told me
she was Clara, the niece of Frau Steinmann, and that she was very glad
to see me, but was very sorry I had had so long to wait in Koeln
yesterday. She liked my dress, and was it _echt Englisch_--also, how
much did it cost?

She was a cheery little person, and I liked her. She seemed to like me
too, and repeatedly said she was glad I had come. She liked dancing she
said. Did I? And she had lately danced at a ball with some one who
danced so well--_aber_, quite indescribably well. His name was Karl
Linders, and he was, _ach!_ really a remarkable person. A bright blush,
and a little sigh accompanied the remark. Our eyes met, and from that
moment Clara and I were very good friends.

I went upstairs again, and found that Miss Hallam proposed, during the
forenoon, to go and find the Eye Hospital, where she was to see the
oculist, and arrange for him to visit her, and shortly after eleven we
set out.

The street that I had so dimly seen the night before, showed itself by
daylight to be a fair, broad way. Down the middle, after the pleasant
fashion of continental towns, was a broad walk, planted with two double
rows of lindens, and on either side this lindenallee was the carriage
road, private houses, shops, exhibitions, boarding-houses. In the
middle, exactly opposite our dwelling, was the New Theater, just drawing
to the close of its first season. I looked at it without thinking much
about it. I had never been in a theater in my life, and the name was but
a name to me.

Turning off from the pretty allee, and from the green Hofgarten which
bounded it at one end, we entered a narrow, ill-paved street, the aspect
of whose gutters and inhabitants alike excited my liveliest disgust. In
this street was the Ey