thirty-six of the most
exquisite women conceivable to the mind of man. Some of these are
women, like the Empress of Austria, who were justly famed for a beauty
which is not often the gift of royalty. Others are women of whom you
have never heard, but so lovely that it would be impossible not to
remember their loveliness for ever and a day.

We all enthusiastically bought photographs of the painting of the
Empress Elizabeth at the age of eighteen, which to my mind is one of the
most exquisite faces ever put upon canvas, and then, highly elated with
our presentation of Munich to Mrs. Jimmie and Bee, we gaily wended our
way southward, following the river Isar for a time, until we reached
Innsbruck, on our way to the Achensee.

At Innsbruck we halted for a sentimental reason which I am not ashamed
to divulge, as the ridicule of the public would be sweet approval
compared to the way Jimmie wore himself to a shadow in the violence of
his jeers. But the fact is that the King Arthur of Tennyson has always
been one of my heroes, and in the Franciscan Church or the Hofkirche in
Innsbruck, there were twenty-eight heroic bronze statues, the finest of
these being of Arthur, Koenig von England, by the famous Peter Vischer
of Nuremberg.

So in Innsbruck we paused for a few days, finding it delightful beyond
our ideas of it, and exquisitely picturesque, situated on both banks of
a dear little foaming, yellow river, with foot-bridges upon which you
may stand and watch it rage and churn, and around it on all sides rising
the mountains of the Bavarian Alps, which are not so near as to crowd
you. Mountains smother me as a rule.

Jimmie obligingly took us at once to the Hofkirche, to get to which we
passed under the Triumphal Gate, erected by the citizens on the occasion
of the entry of the Emperor Francis I. and the Empress Maria Theresa, to
commemorate the marriage of Prince Leopold, who afterward became the
Emperor Leopold II., with the Infanta Maria Ludovica. This magnificent
arch is of granite and will last thousands of years. It reminded me of
the Dewey Arch in New York--it was so different.

The Emperor Maximilian I. directed in his will that the Hofkirche should
be built, and in the centre of the nave he is represented kneeling by a
sumptuous bronze statue, surrounded by the statues I had come to see.
Jimmie declared that the marble sarcophagus upon which the statue of
Maximilian is placed was "worth the price of admission," b