[MAX RANDER'S WAR STORY.]
BY MATTHEW WHITE, JUN.
It was a year ago last fall. I was only eleven then, and we were all travelling over in Europe—father, mother, Thad, and I.
Thad's my little brother, you know, two years younger than I am.
Well, we had been to London, with its jolly cabs, and to Paris, with its funny sewers, and were on our way back from little Switzerland, with its big mountains, when father took it into his head to stop for a week in a poky old town somewhere in Germany.
Here we staid at a dreadfully quiet hotel on a narrow street, which Thad called an alley; but father liked it because it was right opposite a house where he used to board in a professor's family when he was a boy.
We had been in this dismal place for three or four days, when one morning mother woke up with one of her nervous spells, so instead of our all going off for a long walk in the country, father staid home with mother, and sent Thad and me to take a stroll through the streets near the hotel, where there was not any danger of our getting lost.
Well, we started out and walked twice around the market-place, stood gazing for five minutes at some dusty cakes and candy in the confectioner's window, and spent ten minutes more in watching the German boys play their stupid games during recess at the Gymnasium, which is not a gymnasium at all, but a grammar school. Then when they all went back to their books again, we were left out in the roughly paved street with no sidewalks, nobody in it to look at, no horse-cars to ride on, and the sun shining as brightly as if we were having a jolly good time, and were hoping it would not rain.