Adieu, lots of love from your aff. WILHELM. * * * * * The preceding letter shows James as but recently arrived in Berlin and as arranging himself there for a winter of physiology at the University. He was soon joined by his young compatriot Thomas Sergeant Perry, an intimate friend of earlier Newport days and of the subsequent Boston and Cambridge years, and the two young Americans set up joint lodgings at Number 12 in the Mittelstrasse. Although James's main purpose was to work at the University, he was luckily not without social resources. George Bancroft, the historian and former Secretary of the Navy and Minister to England, was at this time representing the United States in Berlin and was an old family acquaintance. His and another hospitable family, the Louis Thieses, who had been Cambridge neighbors and whose house in Quincy Street the James parents had acquired upon Mr. Thies's return to his native land, were a link with home, and at the same time rendered hospitable services to James by helping him to a few German acquaintances. By far the most congenial and interesting of these was Herman Grimm, the son of the younger of the universally beloved brothers of the Fairy Tales. Herman Grimm had married Gisela von Arnim, the daughter of Goethe's Bettina, and was at this time a man of just past forty years. Professor of the History of Art in the University of Berlin, essayist, author of "The Life of Michael Angelo" and of Lectures on Goethe as well as of several works of fiction, Grimm was a versatile and charming specimen of that "learned" Germany which we now think of as flourishing most amiably during the generation that preceded the Franco-Prussian War. The easy and cordial way in which his household accepted James appears, as in the next letter, to have been richly appreciated. _To his Sister._ BERLIN, _Oct. 17, 1867_. Your excellent long letter of September 5 reached me in due time. If about that time you felt yourself strongly hugged by some invisible spiritual agency, you may now know that it was _me_. What would not I give if you could pay me a visit here! Since I last wrote home the lingual Rubicon has been passed, and I find to my surprise that I can speak German--certainly not in an ornamental manner, but there is hardly anything which I would not dare to attempt to _begin_ to say and be pretty sure that a kind providence would pull me through, somehow or other. I made the discovery at my first visit to Grimm a fortnight ago, and have confirmed it several times since. I can likewise understand educated people perfectly. I feel my German as old Moses used to feel his oats, and for ten days past have walked along the street dandling my head in a fatuous manner that rivets the attention of the public. The University lectures were to have begun this week, but the lazy professors have put it off to the last of the month. [Illustration: Pencil Sketches from a Pocket Note-Book.]