The second anniversary was in Cambridge.  We always used to laugh each year and say:  “Gracious! if any one had told us a year ago we’d be here this September seventh!” Every year we were somewhere we never dreamed we would be.  That first September seventh, the night of the wedding, we were to be in Seattle for years—­selling bonds.  What a fearful prospect in retrospect, compared to what we really did!  The second September, back in Oakland, we thought we were to be in the bond business for years in Oakland.  More horrible thoughts as I look back upon it.  The third September seventh, the second anniversary, lo and behold, was in Cambridge, Massachusetts!  Whoever would have guessed it, in all the world?  It was three days after Carl’s return from that awful Freiburg summer—­we left Nandy with a kind-hearted neighbor, and away we spreed to Boston, to the matinee and something good to eat.

Then, whoever would have imagined for a moment that the next year we would be celebrating in Berlin—­dinner at the Cafe Rheingold, with wine!  The fourth anniversary was at Heidelberg—­one of the red-letter days, as I look back upon those magic years.  We left home early, with our lunch, which we ate on a bed of dry leaves in a fairy birch forest back—­and a good ways up—­in the Odenwald.  Then we walked and walked—­almost twenty-five miles all told—­through little forest hamlets, stopping now and then at some small inn along the roadside for a cheese sandwich or a glass of beer.  By nightfall we reached Neckarsteinach and the railroad, and prowled around the twisted narrow streets till train-time, gazing often at our beloved Dilsberg crowning the hilltop across the river, her ancient castle tower and town walls showing black against the starlight.  The happiness, the foreign untouristed wonder of that day!

Our fifth anniversary was another red-letter day—­one of the days that always made me feel, in looking back on it, that we must have been people in a novel, an English novel; that it could not really have been Carl and I who walked that perfect Saturday from Swanage to Studland.  But it was our own two joyous souls who explored that quaint English thatched-roof, moss-covered corner of creation; who poked about the wee old mouldy church and cemetery; who had tea and muffins and jam out under an old gnarled apple tree behind a thatched-roof cottage.  What a wonder of a day it was!  And indeed it was my Carl and I who walked the few miles home toward sunset, swinging hands along the downs, and fairly speechless with the glory of five years married and England and our love.  I should like to be thinking of that day just before I die.  It was so utterly perfect, and so ours.