I've been reading some of the very beautiful prayers in my mother's English Prayer Book to make up for not having prayed in church today. Its margins are thickly covered with pencilled comments. In parts like the Psalms and Canticles they overflow into the spaces between the verses. They are chiefly notes on the beauties of thought and language, and comparisons with similar passages in the Bible. Here and there between the pages are gummed little pictures of Madonnas and 'piteous Christs.' But when the Athanasian Creed is reached the tone of the comment changes. Over the top of it is written 'Some one has said there is a vein of dry humor running through this Creed that is very remarkable.' And at the end of each of those involved clauses that try quite vainly, yet with an air of defying criticism, to describe the undescribable, my mother has written with admirable caution 'Perhaps.' LIV Galgenberg, Nov. 7th. Dear Mr. Anstruther,--So you are coming to Berlin next month. I thought you told me in one of your letters that Washington was probably going to be your first diplomatic post. Evidently you are glad it is not; but if I were going to be an _attaché_ I'd much rather be it at Washington than Berlin, the reason being that I've not been to Washington and I have been to Berlin. Why are you so pleased--forgive me, I meant so much pleased, but it is strange how little instinct has to do with grammar--about Berlin? You didn't like it when you were here and went for two days to look at it. You said it was a hard white place, full of broad streets with nobody in them. You said it was barren, soulless, arid, pretentious, police-ridden; that everybody was an official, and that all the officials were rude. You were furious with a policeman who stared at you without answering when you asked him the way. You were scandalized by the behavior of the men in the local trains who sat and smoked in the faces of the standing women, and by those men who walked with their female relations in the streets and caused their parcels to be carried by them. You came home to us saying that Jena was best, and you were thankful to be with us again. I went to Berlin once, a little while before you came to Germany, and didn't like it either. But I didn't like it because it was so full, because those streets that seemed to you so empty were bewildering to me in their tumultuous traffic,--so you see how a place is what your own eye makes it, your Jena or your London eye; and I didn't like it besides because we spent a sulphuric night and morning with relations. The noise of the streets all day and the sulphur of the relations at night spoilt it for me. We went there for a jaunt, to look at the museums and things, and stay the night with Papa's brother who lives there. He is Papa's younger brother, and spends his days in a bank, handing out and raking in money through a hole in a kind of cage. He has a pen behind his ear--I know, because we were taken