(_After dinner._) I have just been out to dine. I am gradually getting acquainted with all the different restaurants in the neighborhood, of which there are an endless number, and will presently choose one for good,--certainly not the one where I went today, where I paid 25 _Groschen_ for a soup, chicken and potatoes, and was almost prevented from breathing by the damned condescension of the waiters. I fairly sigh for a home table. I used to find a rather pleasant excitement in dining "round," that is long since played out. Could I but find some of the honest, florid and ornate ministers that wait on you at the Parker House, here, I would stick to their establishment, no matter what the fare. These indifferent reptiles here, dressed in cast-off wedding-suits, insolent and disobliging and always trying to cheat you in the change, are the plague of my life. After dinner I took quite a long walk under the Linden and round by the Palace and Museum. There are great numbers of statues (a great many of them "equestrian") here, and you have no idea how they light up the place. What you say about the change of the seasons wakens an echo in my soul. Today is really a harbinger of winter, and felt like an October day at home, with a northwest wind, cold and crisp with a white light, and the red leaves falling and blowing everywhere. I expect T. S. Perry in a week. We shall have a very good large parlor and bedroom, _together_, in this house, and steer off in fine style right into the bowels of the winter. I expect it to be a stiff one, as everyone speaks of it here with a certain solemnity.... I wish you would articulately display to me in your future letters the names of all the books you have been reading. "A great many books, none but good ones," is provokingly vague. On looking back at what _I_ have read since I left home, it shows exceeding small, owing in great part I suppose to its being in German. I have just got settled down again--after a nearly-two-months' debauch on French fiction, during which time Mrs. Sand, the fresh, the bright, the free; the somewhat shrill but doughty Balzac, who has risen considerably in my esteem or rather in my affection; Théophile Gautier the good, the golden-mouthed, in turn captivated my attention; not to speak of the peerless Erckmann-Chatrian, who renews one's belief in the succulent harmonies of creation--and a host of others. I lately read Diderot, "OEuvres Choisies," 2 vols., which are entertaining to the utmost from their animal spirits and the comic modes of thinking, speaking and behaving of the time. Think of meeting continually such delicious sentences as this,--he is speaking of the educability of beasts,--"Et peut-on savoir jusqu'où l'usage des mains porterait les singes s'ils avaient le loisir comme la faculté d'inventer, et si la frayeur continuelle que leur inspirent les hommes ne les retenait dans l'abrutissement"!!! But I must pull up, as I have to write to Father still....