"Hum! North or middle German!--upon that point she is positively fiendish! In the very first hour of our meeting, this Fräulein asked me what sort of society we had here--of course, the aristocratic society, as it loves to call itself; for a mere crowd of human beings, without the forms of etiquette, can never be regarded as human society. I replied quietly that the so-called _good_ society here was the worst one could possibly wish for, and that it was only in the so-called _bad_ society that I had come across a few good comrades here and there, with whom there was such a thing as living. Whereupon the little princess looked at me as much as to say that she should never have supposed, from my dress--which was anything but suited to the _salon_--that my exclusion from polite society was otherwise than involuntary. But I, pretending not to notice this, proceeded to explain to her at length the reasons which caused me to be disgusted with the _crême_ of our city; the strange odor of their _salons_--a mixture of patchouli, incense, and the stable--their very doubtful French, and their undoubtedly worse German; their almost sublime ignorance of all that is generally considered to belong to education; and that _naïve_ lack of knowledge in moral matters, which is generally to be found only in convents, and which can only be properly fostered by an ecclesiastical society and sanctioned by sly father confessors. Your nobles in the North, so far as I have known them--well, I needn't tell you about the clay of which they are made. No matter what hard-mouthed hobbies they ride in regard to affairs of church and state, they nevertheless hold fast to _noblesse oblige_; and then, too, you are very likely to find, in the castles of Pomerania and the Mark, the Bible and the hymn-book side by side with Ranke's 'History of the Popes' and Macaulay's 'History of England.' With us, on the other hand--to be sure, though, Paul de Kock and the 'Seeress of Prevorst' are also classics, and do not stand on the 'Index Expurgatorius.' I notice that you are thinking to yourself how much less jolly, and more discontented and bristling, I am to-day than I was that night in 'Paradise.' You see, my good fellow, you got acquainted with me then in one of my holiday humors, that come over me only once a month; and, to-day, you see my old Adam with his every-day face. If no one else has told you this, to give you due warning about me, I must confess it myself--since I left the service I have really had no occupation but to scoff and grumble. It is true, we live at a time when every honest fellow will have his hands full if he only conscientiously improves every opportunity to do this. But you know this goes very badly with our celebrated South German good-nature; all the worse if the one who scolds happens to be in the right. It is because of this that I have grown old in my lieutenancy; for I could not keep my mouth shut even