and accusatives haunted my dreams by night, and by day I was reduced to the sign language. I had left my first pension, and crushing down the temptation to live in one of the big, gay German-American pensions, where justice is tempered with mercy, so to speak, I moved myself and my piano into a real German one, where I was the only alien. It was one floor of a large house in a quiet side street--the top floor, and no elevator! I climbed eighty-seven steps by actual count every time I came home from a lesson. I had a huge room, heated by steam, with board for four marks a day. The meals were _echt Deutsch_. Breakfast was set ready on the dining-room table at some unearthly hour, and the guests went in and helped themselves when they chose. The coffee and hot milk were kept warm over little alcohol flames, and there were delicious Berlin rolls and the best of unsalted butter. Dinner was at two, and was good in its plain way. We had some North German dishes which one had to learn to enjoy, like olives. Hot chocolate soup I grew quite fond of, but beer soup, sorrel soup, and cabbage soup with cherries in it were never exactly intimates of mine. One dish of baked ham with dumplings and hot plum jam sounds strange, but improves on acquaintance; _Pumpernickel_, and _Schmierkaese_ are better than their names, and _Kartoffelpuffen mit Preisselbeeren_ (potato cakes with cranberries) are delicious. We had good plain puddings and black coffee for dessert every day, and quite wonderful roast Pomeranian goose and _Eistorte_ with whipped cream on Sundays. Supper was at eight, and the menu was certainly a model for the simple life. Bread and butter with slices of sausage and cold ham, sometimes big dishes of roast chestnuts instead of cold meat, or potatoes in their jackets, or some of the endless variety of North-German cheeses--to drink, tea or beer, and that was all. My fellow pensionnaires were nearly all teachers, or students preparing to be teachers. They all spoke German and nothing but German, and, at first, I used to think my mind would drown in the overwhelming floods of it that assailed my ears. Gradually it came to sound like individual words and phrases, and soon I dared occasionally to launch a small conversational barque upon it, avoiding the disastrous rocks of gender as skilfully as possible, though often at first, by the time that my genders and cases were all arranged for a sentence, the subject had changed, and I could not use it. We had a Fräulein Lanz, Fräulein Franz, and Fräulein Kranz, four or five other Fräuleins and no males at all.