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, Imean the families of university professors, for instance, to take in foreigners, and give them tolerable food and a liberal education.
Here it is otherwise.Nearly all families occupy one floor of a building, renting just rooms enough for the family, so that their apartments are not elastic enough to take in strangers, even if they desire to do so.And generally they do not.Munich society is perhaps chargeable with being a little stiff and exclusive.Well, we advertised in the "Neueste Nachrichten." This is the liberal paper of Munich.It is a poorly printed, black-looking daily sheet, folded in octavo size, and containing anywhere from sixteen to thirty-four pages, more or less, as it happens to have advertisements.It sometimes will not have more than two or three pages of reading matter.There will be a scrap or two of local news, the brief telegrams taken from the official paper of the day before, a bit or two of other news, and perhaps a short and slashing editorial on the ultramontane party.The advantage of printing and folding it in such small leaves is, that the size can be varied according to the demands of advertisements or news (if the German papers ever find out what that is); so that the publisher is always giving, every day, just what it pays to give that day; and the reader has his regular quantity of reading matter, and does not have to pay for advertising space, which in journals of unchangeable form cannot always be used profitably.This little journal was started something like twenty years ago.It probably spends little for news, has only one or, at most, two editors, is crowded with advertisements, which are inserted cheap, and costs, delivered, a little over six francs a year.It circulates in the city some thirty-five thousand.There is another little paper here of the same size, but not so many leaves, called "The Daily Advertiser," with nothing but advertisements, principally of theaters, concerts, and the daily sights, and one page devoted to some prodigious yarn, generally concerning America, of which country its readers must get the most extraordinary and frightful impression.
The "Nachrichten" made the fortune of its first owner, who built himself a fine house out of it, and retired to enjoy his wealth.It was recently sold for one hundred thousand guldens; and I can see that it is piling up another fortune for its present owner.The Germans, who herein show their good sense and the high state of civilization to which they have reached, are very free advertisers, going to the newspapers with all their wants, and finding in them that aid which all interests and all sorts of people, from kaiser to kerl, are compelled, in these days, to seek in the daily journal.