Berlin is a bleak and unfriendly place. The inhabitants are rude and graceless, but must conceal a solid worth beneath it. I only know seven of them, and they are of the _élite_. It is very hard getting acquainted with them, as you have to make all the advances yourself; and your antagonist shifts so between friendliness and a drill sergeant's formal politeness that you never know exactly on what footing you stand with him. These Prussians bow in the most amusing way you ever saw,--as if an invisible hand suddenly punched them in the abdomen and an equally invisible foot forthwith kicked them in the rear,--one time and two motions, and they do it 100 times a day. But enough of national gossip--let us return to that about individuals. Oh! that I could see thy prominent nose and thy sagacious eyes at this moment relieved against the back of that empty arm-chair that stands opposite this table. Oh! that we might once again sit apart from the fretful and insipid herd of our congeners, and take counsel together concerning the world and life--our lives in particular, and all life in general. How the shy goddess would tremble in her hiding-places at the sound of our unerringly approaching voices. And how you would pour into my astonished ear all that is new and wonderful about pathology and microscopical research, all that is sound and neat about operative surgery, while I would recite the most thrilling chapters of Kolliker's "Entwickelungs-geschichte," or Helmholtz's "Innervationsfortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeitsbestimmungen"! I suppose you have been rolling on like a great growing snowball through the vast fields of medical knowledge and are fairly out of the long tunnel of low spirits that leads there by this time. It is only three months since I have taken up medical reading, as I made all sorts of excursions into the language when I came here, and, owing to the slowness of progression I spoke of above, I have not got over much ground. Of course I can never hope to practise; but I shall graduate on my return, and perhaps pick up a precarious and needy living by doing work for medical periodicals or something of that kind--though I hate writing as I do the foul fiend. But I don't want to break off connexion with biological science. I can't be a teacher of physiology, pathology, or anatomy; for I can't do laboratory work, much less microscopical or anatomical. I may get better, but hardly before it will be too late for me to begin school again.