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host showed us his house, his books and engravingshe has several etchings by Rembrandt.
Herr von Mechlenberg, public librarian of Konigsberg, a learned little old man, trotted round with us. We had coffee and waffles.
Mechlenberg considers the German tongue a very ancient one, an original language, not patched up like French and English, of native dialects mingled with Latin.”
In one of her letters to the Chicago Tribune is a significant passage written from Lesnian:--
“Having seen in one of the Dantzig papers the announcement that a certain Professor Blank would soon deliver a lecture upon America, showing the folly of headlong emigration thither and the ill fortune which many have wrought for themselves thereby, one of us remarked to a Dantziger that in such a lecture many untruths would probably be uttered.
Our friend replied, with a self-gratulatory laugh, ‘Ah, Madame!
We Germans know all about the women of America.
A German woman is devoted to her household, its care and management; but the American women all force their husbands to live in hotels in order that they may have no trouble in housekeeping.’
”
She was as sensitive to criticism of her country as some people are to criticism of their friends.
Throughout her stay in Germany she suffered from the captious and provoking tone of the Prussian press about things American.
Even in the churches she met this note of unfriendliness.
She took the trouble to transcribe in her Journal an absurd newspaper story.
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 1916.
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