Dear old George,

My fingers are clammy. I am constantly dipping a broken pen in mouldy
ink; but if I don't write to you now, you won't get any news of me for
three weeks. This evening I board the _Roland_ of the North German
Steamship Company.

There seems to be something in your dreams. Nobody could have told you
of my trip. Two hours before I started, I myself knew nothing of it.

Day after to-morrow it will be a year since you came to us direct from
Bremen, after your second journey, with a trunk full of stories,
photographs, and the cigarettes of Simon Arzt. I had scarcely set foot in
England when twenty paces from the landing-place, I beheld our beloved
brand in a shop window. Of course, I bought some, by wholesale, in fact,
and am smoking one while writing, for the sake of auld lang syne.
Unfortunately, this horrible reading-room in which I am writing doesn't
get any the warmer, no matter how many cigarettes I light.

You were with us two weeks when fate came and knocked at the door. We
both rushed to the door and caught a cold, it seems. As for me, I have
sold my house, given up my practice, and put my three children in a
boarding school. And as for my wife, you know what has befallen her.

The devil! Sometimes it makes one creepy to think of the past. To both of
us it seemed a splendid thing for you to take over our sick colleague's
practice. I can see you dashing about to visit your patients in his
sleigh and fur coat. And when he died, I had not the slightest objection
to your settling down as a country physician in the immediate vicinity,
although we had always poked a lot of fun at a country physician's
starvation practice.

Now things have turned out very differently.

Do you remember with what an endless number of monotonous jokes the
goldfinches that fairly overran the Heuscheuer Mountains used to furnish
us? When we approached a bare bush or tree, it would suddenly sway to and
fro and scatter gold leaves. We interpreted that as meaning mountains of
gold. In the evening we dined on goldfinches, because the hunters who
went out on Sundays sold them in great quantities and my tippling cook
cooked them deliciously. At that time you swore you would not remain a
physician. You were not to live from the pockets of poor patients; the
State was to salary you and put at your disposal a huge store of
provisions, so that you could supply your impoverished patients with
flour, wine, meat and necessities. And