The Germans are certainly a most gemuethlich people. The way all the old women told me how "freundlich" their rooms were--"so freundlich mobilirt" and so forth--melted my heart. Whenever you tell an inferior here to do anything (_e.g._ a cabman) he or she replies "Schoen!" or rather "Schehn!" with an accent not quick like a Frenchman's "Bien!" but so protracted, soothing and reassuring to you that you feel as if he were adopting you into his family. You say I've said nothing of the people of this house, but there is nothing to tell about them. The Doctor is an open-hearted excellent man as ever was, and wrapped up in his children; Frau Semler is a sickly, miserly, petty-spirited nonentity. The children are quite uninteresting, though the younger, Anna or Aennchen, aged five, is very handsome and fat. The following short colloquy, which I overheard one day after breakfast a few days since, may serve you as a piece of local colour. Aennchen drops a book she is carrying across the room and exclaims "Herr Jesus!" Mother: "Ach, das sagen _Kinder_ nicht, Anna!" Aennchen (reflectively to herself, sotto voce): "Nicht fur Kinder!" ... What here follows from Divonne--of fourteen months later--is too full and too various to need contribution or comment. You must have envied within the last few weeks my revisiting of the sacred scenes of our youth, the shores of Leman, the Ecu de Geneve, the sloping Corraterie, etc. My only pang in it all has been caused by your absence, or rather by the fact of my presence instead of yours; for I think your abstemious and poetic soul would have got much more good of the things I've seen than my hardening and definite-growing nature. I wrote a few words about Nuernberg to Alice from Montreux. I found that about as pleasant an impression as any I have had since being abroad--and this because I didn't expect it. The Americans at Dresden had told me it was quite uninteresting. I enclose you a few stereographs I got there--I don't know why, for they are totally irrelevant to the real effect of the place. This it would take Theophile Gautier to describe, so I renounce. It was strange to find how little I remembered at Geneva--I couldn't find the way I used to take up to the Academy, and the shops and houses of the Rue du Rhone visible from our old windows left me uncertain whether they were the same or new ones. Kohler has set up a new hotel on the Quai du Mont-Blanc--you remember he's the brother of our old Madame Buscarlet there; but I went for association's sake to the Ecu. The dining-room was differently hung, and the only thing in my whole 24 hours in the place that stung me, so to speak, with memory, was that kind of chinese-patterned dessert-service we used to have. So runs the world away.