"My Revered Friend, I will not now break the habit of eight years, but will spend my New Years' Eve with you, the person who stands nearest to me in all the world. I am alone in this grand villa, the servants seem to be enjoying themselves downstairs over their roast goose and punch, Paul has taken his family and gone into the country to the castle of a neighboring estate owner by whom he is evidently very much impressed, and I can chat with you undisturbed. "I wish you could live for a time in close contact with Paul, as I am doing, you would be surprised and pleased. His development has been wonderfully logical, and he now affords the spectacle, so intensely interesting to the observant eye, of a person whose every capacity, under the influence of the most favorable combination of circumstances imaginable, has attained to the utmost limit of growth which is possible to it. Paul has become the ideal type of our North German landed proprietor. He is ultra conservative, and considers the Socialist Act too mild. He loathes parliamentarianism, but would wish that the Landrath had not the power to appoint even a police constable without the consent of the estate owners of the district, and raves about local police prerogative. His only newspaper, beside the little local one, is the Kreuzzentung, he is learned in the Army List, and the writing-table at which I am sitting is strewed with volumes of the Almanac de Gotha. He looks after his subjects--for I think he calls his workmen his subjects--in a truly fatherly or feudal manner, but I do not doubt that he would drive the best of them off the estate with dogs, if, even in the depth of winter, they did not stand hat in hand the whole time they were talking to him. The sole problem of the universe which has any sort of interest for him is the outlook of the weather for the harvest. The course of human or superhuman events arouses his wonder, his doubts, or his anxiety only in proportion as it affects the price of corn. He cannot grasp that one should have any other aim in life than to become a successful agriculturist. He finds full satisfaction in his work, and what between a charming wife and an adored child he would afford an example of what the fables and proverbs tell us does not exist--a perfectly happy man, if one thing were not lacking, the little word 'von' in front of his name. I trust he may not die without obtaining it, and then the world will have contained one mortal who has known absolutely boundless happiness.