December 1 Sunday – Sam wrote from Munich to his mother, and sister Pamela:

I broke the back of life yesterday & started down-hill toward old age. This fact has not produced any effect upon me that I can detect.

I suppose we are located here for the winter. I have a pleasant work-room a mile from here where I do my writing. The walk to & from that place gives me what exercise I need, & all I take…Livy & Miss Spaulding are studying drawing & German, & the children have a German day-governess [MTLE 3: 103].

Sam and Livy wrote to Susan Crane. Livy wrote about being in a room with six Germans who couldn’t speak a word of English and her being at the end of the three sentences she knew in German, then having to tell Clara what she wanted to say. Sam had activities, too, he wrote:

One of them consists in lying abed, mornings, until I am shoveled out. After breakfast I lie slippered & comfortable on the sofa, with a pipe, & read the meager telegrams in the German paper & the general news in Galignani’s Messenger; & about 11 o’clock bundle up in furs & tramp a mile to my den, which is in the 3d story of a dwelling. The pleasant old German Frau, comes in & builds a fire & talks admiringly about the weather,—no matter how villainous it may be,—because the Creator made it. I find my rubbish of the yesterday all cleaned away, & everything in apple-pie order. The Frau gives me a good roasting, occasionally, & occasionally she freezes me,—but in all cases she means well [MTLE 3: 130].