to gaze upon him between two museums--and wears a black coat on weekdays as well as on Sundays, which greatly dazzled my step-mother, who was with us. I believe he is eminently respectable, and the bank values him as an old and reliable servant, and has made him rich. His salary is eight thousand marks a year--four hundred pounds, sir; four times as much as what we have--and my step-mother used often and fervently to wish that Papa had been more like him. I thought him a terrifying old uncle, a parched, machine-like person, whose soul seemed withdrawn into unexplorable vague distances, reduced to a mere far-off flicker by the mechanical nature of his work. He is ten years younger than Papa, but infinitely more faded. He never laughs. He never even smiles. He is rude to his wife. He is withering to his daughters. He made me think of owls as he sat at supper that night in his prim clothes, with round gloomy eyes fixed on Papa, whom he was lecturing. Papa didn't mind. He had had a happy day, ending with two very glorious hours in the Royal Library, and Tante Else's herring salad was much to his taste. 'Hast thou no respect, Heinrich,' he cried at last when my uncle, warmed by beer, let his lecture slide over the line that had till then divided it from a rating, 'hast thou then no respect for the elder brother, and his white and reverend hairs?' But Onkel Heinrich, aware that he is the success and example of the family, and as intolerant as successes and examples are of laxer and poorer relations, waved Papa's banter aside with contempt, and proposed that instead of wasting any more of an already appallingly wasted life in idle dabblings in so-called literature he too should endeavor to get a post, however humble, in a bank in Berlin, and mend his ways, and earn an income of his own, and cease from living on an income acquired by marriages. My step-mother punctuated his words with nods of approval. 'What, as a doorkeeper, eh, thou cistern filled with wisdom?' cried Papa, lifting his glass and drinking gayly to Tante Else, who glanced uneasily at her husband, he not yet having been, to her recollection, called a cistern. 'It is better,' said my step-mother, to whom a man so punctual, so methodical, and so well-salaried as Onkel Heinrich seemed wholly ideal, 'it is better to be a doorkeeper in--in-' She was seized with doubt as to the applicability of the text, and hesitated. 'A bank?' suggested Papa pleasantly. 'Yes, Ferdinand, even in a bank rather than dwell in the tents of wickedness.' 'That,' explained Papa to Tante Else, leaning back in his chair and crossing his hands comfortably over what, you being English, I will call his chest, 'is my dear wife's poetic way--' 'Scriptural way, Ferdinand,' interrupted my step-mother. 'I know no poetic ways.' 'It is the same thing, _meine Liebste_. The Scriptures are drenched in poetry. Poetic way, I say, of referring to Jena.'