But about moving.  Let me tell you that to change quarters in the face of a Munich winter, which arrives here the 1st of November, is like changing front to the enemy just before a battle; and if we had perished in the attempt, it might have been put upon our monuments, as it is upon the out-of-cannon-cast obelisk in the Karolina Platz, erected to the memory of the thirty thousand Bavarian soldiers who fell in the disastrous Russian winter campaign of Napoleon, fighting against all the interests of Germany,—­“they, too, died for their Fatherland.”  Bavaria happened also to fight on the wrong side at Sadowa and I suppose that those who fell there also died for Fatherland:  it is a way the Germans have of doing, and they mean nothing serious by it.  But, as I was saying, to change quarters here as late as November is a little difficult, for the wise ones seek to get housed for the winter by October:  they select the sunny apartments, get on the double windows, and store up wood.  The plants are tied up in the gardens, the fountains are covered over, and the inhabitants go about in furs and the heaviest winter clothing long before we should think of doing so at home.  And they are wise:  the snow comes early, and, besides, a cruel fog, cold as the grave and penetrating as remorse, comes down out of the near Tyrol.  One morning early in November, I looked out of the window to find snow falling, and the ground covered with it.  There was dampness and frost enough in the air to make it cling to all the tree-twigs, and to take fantastic shapes on all the queer roofs and the slenderest pinnacles and most delicate architectural ornamentations.  The city spires had a mysterious appearance in the gray haze; and above all, the round-topped towers of the old Frauenkirche, frosted with a little snow, loomed up more grandly than ever.  When I went around to the Hof Garden, where I late had sat in the sun, and heard the brown horse-chestnuts drop on the leaves, the benches were now full of snow, and the fat and friendly fruit-woman at the gate had retired behind glass windows into a little shop, which she might well warm by her own person, if she radiated heat as readily as she used to absorb it on the warm autumn days, when I have marked her knitting in the sunshine.

But we are not moving.  The first step we took was to advertise our wants in the “Neueste Nachrichten” ("Latest News “) newspaper.  We desired, if possible, admission into some respectable German family, where we should be forced to speak German, and in which our society, if I may so express it, would be some compensation for our bad grammar.  We wished also to live in the central part of the city,—­in short, in the immediate neighborhood of all the objects of interest (which are here very much scattered), and to have pleasant rooms.  In Dresden, where the people are not so rich as in Munich, and where different customs prevail, it is customary for the best people, I mean the families of university professors,