I must beg your pardon--it is a shame that I have not written before in the eight days I have been here. My time has been so taken up with all the things there are to see--I’ll tell you about them afterwards. Now I must ask if all the dear ones, you and Tom and Gerda and Erica and Christian and Tilda and Ida, are well--that is the most important thing. Ah, what all I have seen in these days!--the Pinakothek and the Glyptothek and the Hofbräuhaus and the Court Theatre and the churches, and quantities of other things! I must tell you of them when I see you; otherwise I should kill myself writing. We have also had a drive in the Isar valley, and for to-morrow an excursion to the Wurmsee is arranged. So it goes on. Eva is very sweet to me, and her husband, Herr Niederpaur, the brewery superintendent, is an agreeable man. We live in a very pretty square in the town, with a fountain in the middle, like ours at home in the market place, and the house is quite near the Town Hall. I have never seen such a house. It is painted from top to bottom, in all colours--St. Georges killing dragons, and old Bavarian princes in full robes and arms. Imagine! Yes, I like Munich extremely. The air is very strengthening to the nerves, and for the moment I am quite in order with my stomach trouble. I enjoy drinking the beer--I drink a good deal, the more so as the water is not very good. But I cannot quite get used to the food. There are too few vegetables and too much flour, for instance in the sauces, which are pathetic. They have no idea of a proper joint of veal, for the butchers cut everything very badly. And I miss the fish. It is quite mad to be eating so much cucumber and potato salad with the beer--my tummy rebels audibly. Yes, one has to get used to a great deal. It is a real foreign country. The strange currency, the difficulty of understanding the common people--I speak too fast to them and they seem to talk gibberish to me--and then the Catholicism. I hate it, as you know; I have no respect for it-- Here the Consul began to laugh, leaning back in the sofa with a piece of bread and herb cheese in his hand. “Yes, Tom, you are laughing,” said his Mother, and tapped with her middle finger on the table. “But it pleases me very much that she holds fast to the faith of her fathers and shuns the unevangelical gim-crackery. I know that you felt a certain sympathy for the papal church, while you were in France and Italy: but that is not religion in you, Tom--it is something else, and I understand what. We must be forbearing; yet in these things a frivolous feeling of fascination is very much to be regretted. I pray God that you and your Gerda,--for I well know that she does not belong to those firm in the faith--will in the course of time feel the necessary seriousness. You will forgive your mother her words, I know.”