wspaper woman with a capital PAST and a
shaky future. I wish that I were chummier with the Irish saints. I need
them now.

CHAPTER VI. STEEPED IN GERMAN

I am living at a little private hotel just across from the court house
square with its scarlet geraniums and its pretty fountain. The house
is filled with German civil engineers, mechanical engineers, and
Herr Professors from the German academy. On Sunday mornings we have
Pfannkuchen with currant jelly, and the Herr Professors come down to
breakfast in fearful flappy German slippers. I'm the only creature
in the place that isn't just over from Germany. Even the dog is a
dachshund. It is so unbelievable that every day or two I go down to
Wisconsin Street and gaze at the stars and stripes floating from the
government building, in order to convince myself that this is America.
It needs only a Kaiser or so, and a bit of Unter den Linden to be quite
complete.

The little private hotel is kept by Herr and Frau Knapf. After one has
seen them, one quite understands why the place is steeped in a German
atmosphere up to its eyebrows.

I never would have found it myself. It was Doctor von Gerhard who had
suggested Knapf's, and who had paved the way for my coming here.

"You will find it quite unlike anything you have ever tried before,"
he warned me. "Very German it is, and very, very clean, and most
inexpensive. Also I think you will find material there--how is it you
call it?--copy, yes? Well, there should be copy in plenty; and types!
But you shall see."

From the moment I rang the Knapf doorbell I saw. The dapper, cheerful
Herr Knapf, wearing a disappointed Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, opened the
door. I scarcely had begun to make my wishes known when he interrupted
with a large wave of the hand, and an elaborate German bow.

"Ach yes! You would be the lady of whom the Herr Doktor has spoken.
Gewiss! Frau Orme, not? But so a young lady I did not expect to see. A
room we have saved for you--aber wunderhubsch! It makes me much pleasure
to show. Folgen Sie mir, bitte."

"You--you speak English?" I faltered, with visions of my evenings spent
in expressing myself in the sign language.

"Englisch? But yes. Here in Milwaukee it gives aber mostly German. And
then too, I have been only twenty years in this country. And always in
Milwaukee. Here is it gemutlich--and mostly it gives German."

I tried not to look frightened, and followed him up to the "but
wonderfully beau