Titian’s beauties all need an obesity remedy, and Jimmie criticises most “beauties” so severely that we have got to searching them out, when we are tired and cross, just to vent our spleen upon.

Jimmie’s favourite story is the old, old one of the old woman who saw a hippopotamus for the first time.  She looked at him a moment in silence and then said:  “My! ain’t he plain!”

It is pre-historic, that story, but it has saved our lives many a time in Europe.  It fits so many cases, and I mention it here just to prove my point.  Go, then, to the “Gallery of Beauties” in the Palace, and you will find thirty-six portraits by Steiler, of thirty-six of the most exquisite women conceivable to the mind of man.  Some of these are women, like the Empress of Austria, who were justly famed for a beauty which is not often the gift of royalty.  Others are women of whom you have never heard, but so lovely that it would be impossible not to remember their loveliness for ever and a day.

We all enthusiastically bought photographs of the painting of the Empress Elizabeth at the age of eighteen, which to my mind is one of the most exquisite faces ever put upon canvas, and then, highly elated with our presentation of Munich to Mrs. Jimmie and Bee, we gaily wended our way southward, following the river Isar for a time, until we reached Innsbruck, on our way to the Achensee.

At Innsbruck we halted for a sentimental reason which I am not ashamed to divulge, as the ridicule of the public would be sweet approval compared to the way Jimmie wore himself to a shadow in the violence of his jeers.  But the fact is that the King Arthur of Tennyson has always been one of my heroes, and in the Franciscan Church or the Hofkirche in Innsbruck, there were twenty-eight heroic bronze statues, the finest of these being of Arthur, Koenig von England, by the famous Peter Vischer of Nuremberg.

So in Innsbruck we paused for a few days, finding it delightful beyond our ideas of it, and exquisitely picturesque, situated on both banks of a dear little foaming, yellow river, with foot-bridges upon which you may stand and watch it rage and churn, and around it on all sides rising the mountains of the Bavarian Alps, which are not so near as to crowd you.  Mountains smother me as a rule.

Jimmie obligingly took us at once to the Hofkirche, to get to which we passed under the Triumphal Gate, erected by the citizens on the occasion of the entry of the Emperor Francis I. and the Empress Maria Theresa, to commemorate the marriage of Prince Leopold, who afterward became the Emperor Leopold II., with the Infanta Maria Ludovica.  This magnificent arch is of granite and will last thousands of years.  It reminded me of the Dewey Arch in New York—­it was so different.

The Emperor Maximilian I. directed in his will that the Hofkirche should be built, and in the centre of the nave he is represented kneeling by a sumptuous bronze statue, surrounded by the statues I had come to see.  Jimmie declared that the marble sarcophagus upon which the statue of Maximilian is placed was “worth the price of admission,” but Jimmie’s opinion is of no value except when he is accidentally right, as in this instance.  He studied this and the monument of Andreas Hofer, whose remains are buried here, under a magnificent sarcophagus of Tyrolese marble, leaving us to our bronze statues.