We headed for Leipzig at once, and there Carl unearthed the Pension Schroeter on Sophien Platz.  There we had two rooms and all the food we could eat,—­far too much for us to eat, and oh! so delicious,—­for fifty-five dollars a month for the entire family, although Jim hardly ranked as yet, economically speaking, as part of the consuming public.  We drained Leipzig to the dregs—­a good German idiom.  Carl worked at his German steadily, almost frantically, with a lesson every day along with all his university work—­a seven o’clock lecture by Buecher every morning being the cheery start for the day, and we blocks and blocks from the University.  I think of Carl through those days with extra pride, though it is hard to decide that I was ever prouder of him at one time than another.  But he strained and labored without ceasing at such an uninspiring job.  All his hard study that broken-hearted summer at Freiburg had given him no single word of an economic vocabulary.  In Leipzig he listened hour by hour to the lectures of his German professors, sometimes not understanding an important word for several days, yet exerting every intellectual muscle to get some light in his darkness.  Then, for, hours each day and almost every evening, it was grammar, grammar, grammar, till he wondered at times if all life meant an understanding of the subjunctive.  Then, little by little, rays of hope.  “I caught five words in ——­’s lecture to-day!” Then it was ten, then twenty.  Never a lecture of any day did he miss.

We stole moments for joy along the way.  First, of course, there was the opera—­grand opera at twenty-five cents a seat.  How Wagner bored us at first—­except the parts here and there that we had known all our lives.  Neither of us had had any musical education to speak of; each of us got great joy out of what we considered “good” music, but which was evidently low-brow.  And Wagner at first was too much for us.  That night in Leipzig we heard the “Walkuere!”—­utterly aghast and rather impatient at so much non-understandable noise.  Then we would drop down to “Carmen,” “La Boheme,” Hoffman’s “Erzaeblung,” and think, “This is life!” Each night that we spared for a spree we sought out some beer-hall—­as unfrequented a one as possible, to get all the local color we could.

Once Carl decided that, as long as we had come so far, I must get a glimpse of real European night-life—­it might startle me a bit, but would do no harm.  So, after due deliberation, he led me to the Cafe Bauer, the reputed wild and questionable resort of Leipzig night-life, though the pension glanced ceiling-wards and sighed and shook their heads.  I do not know just what I did expect to see, but I know that what I saw was countless stolid family parties—­on all sides grandmas and grandpas and sons and daughters, and the babies in high chairs beating the tables with spoons.  It was quite the most moral atmosphere we ever found ourselves in.  That is what you get for deliberately setting out to see the wickedness of the world!