The first of September, without a word of German, I set out for Berlin. My mother had come over during the preceding Spring, to make her home in Paris with my sculptor brother Cecil and my sister. From this time on I went to them for the summers, and my sister joined me when I went to Metz, and has never left me since. It made it harder to leave both family and Paris behind and go into an unknown land, but I felt it to be the best way. Lilli Lehmann's studio was my objective point. I found her address in a musical journal, and armed with that, and the address of an inexpensive _pension_, I took the train. Arrived in Berlin, I took a _Droschke_, directing the driver to my pension by showing him the street and number on a piece of paper. Somewhere between that _Droschke_ and my room, my travelling clock got lost, and what a time I had to recover it! The apple-cheeked maid knew of the existence of no other language beside her own. In vain I made a pendulum of my finger and tirelessly repeated "tick, tick"--no gleam of intelligence dawned in her Prussian blue eyes. The first few days brought a series of disappointments. The Lehmann idea had to be abandoned. She was out of town and recommended me by letter to a certain Herr----, to whom she was sending every one who applied to her. I found him a dear old man indeed, but one who had nothing to say to me on the subject of voice production which I had not heard already. However, I decided to begin the study of German repertoire with him, painstakingly re-learning the operas I already knew in French, and adding the new ones required for a German engagement. Later I found a good _répétiteur_, who knew the operas thoroughly, quite sufficient and much cheaper, as he charged only four marks ($1.00) an hour. I studied the words of my rôles with Herr----'s wife, who had been an actress and a good one, and who laid the foundation of what I am proud to say is now a perfect German accent. These lessons were five marks an hour and were quite worth it. I would learn a rôle by heart, sentence by sentence, looking up every word in the dictionary and writing in the translation over the German, spending hours in fruitless search for a past participle which did not look as if it belonged to its infinitive, the only part of the verb, of course, to be given in the dictionary! Then, sentence by sentence, I would go over it with Frau----, repeating each word after her, sometimes twenty times! We also used those splendid books, known I found afterwards to every German actor, in which paragraphs of words with the same vowel sound or combination of vowel and consonants are given to be repeated over and over again. Besides this drudgery, I had German lessons for four months (at three marks or seventy-five cents) for which I had to translate and write exercises. All the labyrinths of the declension of articles, nouns and adjectives in three genders and plurals, lay before me to be explored. The datives