think I need translate that for you.

There is one thing that burthens me a good deal in my patriotic
garrulage, and that is the black ignorance in which I grope about
everything, as, for example, when I gave yesterday a full and, I fancy,
a startlingly incorrect account of Scotch education to a very stolid
German on a garden bench: he sat and perspired under it, however, with
much composure. I am generally glad enough to fall back again, after
these political interludes, upon Burns, toddy, and the Highlands.

I go every night to the theatre, except when there is no opera. I cannot
stand a play yet; but I am already very much improved, and can
understand a good deal of what goes on.

_Friday, August 2, 1872._--In the evening, at the theatre, I had a great
laugh. Lord Allcash in _Fra Diavolo_, with his white hat, red
guide-books, and bad German, was the _piece-de-resistance_ from a
humorous point of view; and I had the satisfaction of knowing that in my
own small way I could minister the same amusement whenever I chose to
open my mouth.

I am just going off to do some German with Simpson.--Your affectionate
son,

R. L. STEVENSON.

TO THOMAS STEVENSON

_Frankfurt, Rosengasse 13, August 4, 1872._

MY DEAR FATHER,--You will perceive by the head of this page that we have
at last got into lodgings, and powerfully mean ones too. If I were to
call the street anything but _shady_, I should be boasting. The people
sit at their doors in shirt-sleeves, smoking as they do in Seven Dials
of a Sunday.

Last night we went to bed about ten, for the first time _householders_
in Germany--real Teutons, with no deception, spring, or false bottom.
About half-past one there began such a trumpeting, shouting, pealing of
bells, and scurrying hither and thither of feet as woke every person in
Frankfurt out of their first sleep with a vague sort of apprehension
that the last day was at hand. The whole street was alive, and we could
hear people talking in their rooms, or crying to passers-by from their
windows, all around us. At last I made out what a man was saying in the
next room. It was a fire in Sachsenhausen, he said (Sachsenhausen is the
suburb on the other side of the Main), and he wound up with one of the
most tremendous falsehoods on record, "_Hier alles ruht_--here all is
still." If it can be said to be still in an engine factory, or in the
stomach of a volcano when it is meditating an eruption, he might hav