Spelterini is here with his big balloon, to take people traveling above the mountain tops. Some of our friends went up for a few hours, repeatedly, and pronounce the view of the lake, mountain and valley as seen from the sky, something wonderful. He charges 200 francs for a few hours’ ride among the mist and clouds. He passed close above our house yesterday morning at a great rate. He has made a thousand ascents and never had an accident. Riding with his balloon at a height of 15,000 feet, and at an express speed is safer than riding on American railroads. _May 13, 1893._--News has come of the appointment of a new Consul General for Switzerland. The rotating machine has been put to work. I scarcely dare to complain. A new administration at Washington can remove me from office, but it cannot take away from me the pleasure of the past years. Still I have lived so long among the delightful scenes of Switzerland I leave them with a pang. “_Aufwiedersehen_,” our friends call out as they throw us their roses, the train moves, we are looking for the last time possibly on the mountains. Part of this summer of 1893 we spent with our friends, the Witts, at Hamburg, and then together we went to the Island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea, where many delightful weeks among novel scenes were ending our stay in Europe. Later, our friends offered to take us to see Prince Bismarck, at his home at “Friedrichsruhe.” A couple of hours’ ride from Hamburg through an uninteresting country of sand and pine trees, brought us to the little station not far from the ex-Chancellor’s house. It seemed like a villa stuck away in the woods of North Carolina, yet delegations find this hidden spot from every corner of Germany, and come here by trainfuls, to do homage to the man who made the empire. He is a greater man here on his farm than the Emperor is in Berlin on his throne. There is not much about the rather ill-kept looking estate to attract attention. There are a thousand handsomer estates all over Germany.