Your faithful B.

April 2, ’48, Sunday Evening.

I fear, my dear heart, the letter I wrote you last evening reached the post-office so late, through an oversight, that you will not receive it today, and not before tomorrow with this; and it pains me to think that you were disappointed in your hope when the mail was delivered, and now (9 o’clock in the evening) are perhaps troubled with disquietude of all sorts about me.  I have spent a tiresome day, tramping the pavement, smoking and intriguing.  Do not judge of the few words I spoke yesterday from the report in the Berlin Times.  I shall manage to bring you a copy of the speech, which has no significance except as showing that I did not wish to be included in the category of certain venal bureaucrats who turned their coat with contemptible shamelessness to suit the wind.  The impression it made was piteous, while even my most zealous opponents shook my hand with greater warmth after my declaration.  I have just come from a great citizens’ meeting, of perhaps a thousand people, in the Milenz Hall, where the Polish question was debated very decorously, very good speeches were made, and on the whole the sentiment seemed to turn against the Poles, especially after a disconsolate Jew had arrived, straight from Samter, who told terrible stories about the lawless excesses of the Poles against the Germans; he himself had been soundly beaten. * * *

Just for my sake do not alarm yourself if each mail does not bring you a letter from me.  There is not the slightest probability that a hair of our heads will be touched, and my friends of all kinds overrun me, to share their political wisdom with me, so that I began a letter of one-quarter sheet to Malle this morning at 9, and could not finish before 3.  I am living in comfort and economy with Werdeck, only rather far away, in consequence of which I already feel the pavement through my soles.  Cordial remembrances to the mother and the Bellins.  I am writing on the table d’hote table of the Hotel des Princes, and a small salad has just been brought for my supper.

Your very faithful B. April 3, ’48.

Schoenhausen, August 21, ’48. 8.30 P.M.

To HERR VON PUTTKAMER, AT REINFELD, NEAR ZUCKERS, POMERANIA.

Dear Father,—­You have just become, with God’s gracious help, the grandfather of a healthy, well-formed girl that Johanna has presented me with after hard but short pains.  At the moment mother and child are doing as well as one could wish.  Johanna lies still and tired, yet cheerful and composed, behind the curtain; the little creature, in the meantime, under coverlets on the sofa, and squalls off and on.  I am quite glad that the first is a daughter, but if it had been a cat I should have thanked God on my knees the moment Johanna was rid of it:  it is really a desperately hard business.  I came from Berlin last night, and this morning we had no premonition of what was to come.  At ten in the