But I must get back to Heidelberg, where the sympathetic reader will not, I trust, have imagined that I went all this time without dinners because the search for one which should be the _ultima Thule_ of cheapness was embarrassing and adventurous. I found a place, at last, where a homely abundant midday meal was furnished me in a private family, for one gulden and twenty-six kreutzers per week,--a fraction over eight cents a day. My supper I took at a _Gasthaus_, in company with some theological students, at the cost of about four cents. Many of my countrymen, who have spent large sums in endeavoring to live cheaply in the same city, will of course believe nothing of this. They have paid dearly for the privilege of being Americans. They date their experiences from hotels supplied with waiters who speak our language, and have dealt at shops on whose windows they have seen blazoned in golden letters, “ENGLISH SPOKEN.” They have, in reality, paid the teacher who taught these waiters and those shop-keepers to murder our own vernacular. By matriculating at the great University of Heidelberg, I became endowed with all the time-honored privileges of students. I could not be arrested or taken through the streets, if I had been guilty of an ordinary crime; I could not be confined in a common prison or go to a common hospital, the University having those institutions for its own particular benefit. And poverty seemed there to have lost its curse. The very fact of my being a student put me on a social scale above that of the wealthy merchant. This, however, may have been only in the estimation of the collegians themselves. A fellow-student thought some of going to America, and propounded the following question: “But when I arrive, I shall not have any money, and I shall know nothing of the language of the country; what shall I do?” “Go to work!” said I. “What? manual labor! I am too aristocratic!” That young man, let me add, was then living on an income of one hundred and ten dollars a year. * * * * * The German student must have his pipe, his beer, and a life of pleasure at whatever sacrifice. If he is rich, he pays some attention to his personal appearance. You will see him adorned with boots of immense length; _corps_ caps and ribbons; the number of his duels scored on his red face in ungainly sword-scars; and followed by a retinue of sinecurists, in the shape of great ugly worthless dogs. _His_ life is a continued sacrifice to the merry gods. He is rarely seen at lectures. Indeed, there is one society or club at the University, the first article of whose constitution reads, “No member shall at any time, or on any pretence whatever, after matriculation, be seen in the University building.”