spatches, and
it may not be generally known, even in Germany; but then, the cable is
so occupied with relating how his Serenity this, and his Highness that,
and her Loftiness the other one, went outdoors and came in again, owing
to a slight superfluity of the liquid element in the atmosphere, that it
has no time to notice the real movements of the people. And yet, so
dry are some of these little German newspapers of news, that it is
refreshing to read, now and then, that the king, on Sunday, walked out
with the Duke of Hesse after dinner (one would like to know if they also
had sauerkraut and sausage), and that his prospective mother-in-law,
the Empress of Russia, who was here the other day, on her way home from
Como, where she was nearly drowned out by the inundation, sat for an
hour on Sunday night, after the opera, in the winter garden of the
palace, enjoying the most easy family intercourse.

But about moving. Let me tell you that to change quarters in the face
of a Munich winter, which arrives here the 1st of November, is like
changing front to the enemy just before a battle; and if we had perished
in the attempt, it might have been put upon our monuments, as it is upon
the out-of-cannon-cast obelisk in the Karolina Platz, erected to
the memory of the thirty thousand Bavarian soldiers who fell in the
disastrous Russian winter campaign of Napoleon, fighting against all the
interests of Germany,--"they, too, died for their Fatherland." Bavaria
happened also to fight on the wrong side at Sadowa and I suppose that
those who fell there also died for Fatherland: it is a way the Germans
have of doing, and they mean nothing serious by it. But, as I was
saying, to change quarters here as late as November is a little
difficult, for the wise ones seek to get housed for the winter by
October: they select the sunny apartments, get on the double windows,
and store up wood. The plants are tied up in the gardens, the fountains
are covered over, and the inhabitants go about in furs and the heaviest
winter clothing long before we should think of doing so at home. And
they are wise: the snow comes early, and, besides, a cruel fog, cold as
the grave and penetrating as remorse, comes down out of the near Tyrol.
One morning early in November, I looked out of the window to find snow
falling, and the ground covered with it. There was dampness and frost
enough in the air to make it cling to all the tree-twigs, and to take
fantastic shapes