A glittering picture of the dinner has remained in my memory. In the richly flower-decked banqueting-hall stood a table laid for two hundred and fifty guests. There was a preliminary gathering in side parlors, and there I made the acquaintance of a great number of literary colleagues of both sexes, and also found again many whom we had met seven years earlier at the Authors’ Convention; there were also parliamentarians, publicists, and other notabilities of Berlin. About ten o’clock Friedrich Spielhagen escorted me to the table, at which he presided. He it was, too, who pronounced the oration of the evening. After he had ended, my right-hand neighbor, Dr. Barth of the Reichstag, spoke. And now I had to express my thanks. A stenographer took down my maiden after-dinner speech, and I found it the next morning in the newspapers: It is in joyful exhilaration that I express to you, Meister Spielhagen, and to you, Herr Dr. Barth, and to all the company who have done me the honor of gathering here, my deep-felt thanks. To be so acclaimed and by such persons—for those who entertain me are certainly among the foremost in the literary and political world here—must indeed fill any one’s heart with pride. Indeed, if one feels, as I do, that this lavish homage so far exceeds the desert of her to whom it is offered, then must the wish be aroused to protest against it and to cry out: It is too much—take back the praise, take back the expression of such kindly sympathy! You fill me with happiness, but you fill me also with mortification. Yet I can gather from your addresses that the reason why the honor conferred upon me so far exceeds the value of my performances and my person is that it does not really concern them, but the principles which I endeavor to serve. They are the same principles to which you, highly honored artists, representatives of the people, and publicists, devote your work and your works—the enfranchisement, ennoblement, and fraternization of civilized mankind. Those minstrels and legislators and journalists who pay homage to war and stir up national differences have assuredly remained absent from this banquet.