t much last night. Oh,
my! do you realize, Mark, what a symposium it is to be? I do. To
begin with, I am thoroughly tired and the rest will be worth
everything. To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together
--why, it's my dream of luxury. Harmony, who at sunrise this morning
deemed herself the happiest woman on the Continent when I read your
letter to her, widened her smile perceptibly, and revived another
degree of strength in a minute. She refused to consider her being
left alone; but: only the great chance opened to me.

SHOES--Mark, remember that ever so much of our pleasure depends upon
your shoes. Don't fail to have adequate preparation made in that
department.

Meantime, the struggle with the "awful German language" went on. It was
a general hand-to-hand contest. From the head of the household down to
little Clara not one was exempt. To Clemens it became a sort of
nightmare. Once in his note-book he says:

"Dreamed all bad foreigners went to German heaven; couldn't talk, and
wished they had gone to the other place"; and a little farther along, "I
wish I could hear myself talk German."

To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira, he reported their troubles:

Clara Spaulding is working herself to death with her German; never
loses an instant while she is awake--or asleep, either, for that
matter; dreams of enormous serpents, who poke their heads up under
her arms and glare upon her with red-hot eyes, and inquire about the
genitive case and the declensions of the definite article. Livy is
bully-ragging herself about as hard; pesters over her grammar and
her reader and her dictionary all day; then in the evening these two
students stretch themselves out on sofas and sigh and say, "Oh,
there's no use! We never can learn it in the world!" Then Livy
takes a sentence to go to bed on: goes gaping and stretching to her
pillow murmuring, "Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr
verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--I wonder if I can get that
packed away so it will stay till morning"--and about an hour after
midnight she wakes me up and says, "I do so hate to disturb you, but
is it 'Ich Ben Jonson sehr befinden'?"

And Mrs. Clemens wrote:

Oh, Sue dear, strive to enter in at the straight gate, for many
shall seek to enter it and shall not be able. I am not striving
these days. I am just interested in