A PLEASANT SURPRISE! That winter was the dullest ever known in the little household of the Gulden Strasse, and the coldest experienced for years in Lubeck--quiet town of cold winters, situated as it is on the shores of the ice-bound Baltic! It was such bitter, inclement weather, with the thermometer going down to zero and the snow freezing as it fell, that neither Madame Dort nor old Lorischen went out of the house more than they could help; and, as for Mouser, he lived and slept and miaow-wowed in close neighbourhood to the stove in the parlour, not even the temptation of cream inducing him to leave the protection of its enjoyable warmth.

For him, the mice might ravage the cupboards below the staircase, his whilom happy hunting-ground, at their own sweet will; and the birds, rendered tame by their privations, invade the sanctity of the balcony and the window- sills, whereon at another season their lives would not be worth a moment's purchase.

He heeded them not now, nor did he, as of yore, resent the intrusion of Burgher Jans' terrier, when that predatory animal came prowling within the widow's tenement in company with his master, who had not entirely ceased his periodic visits, in spite of "the cold shoulder" invariably turned to him by Lorischen.

Mouser wasn't going to inconvenience himself for the best dog in Christendom; so, on the advent of the terrier, he merely hopped from the front of the stove to the top, where he frizzled his feet and fizzed at his enemy, without risking the danger of catching an influenza, as he might otherwise have done if he had sought refuge elsewhere out in the cold.
Aye, for it was cold; and many was the time, when, rubbing their tingling fingers, both the widow and Lorischen pitied the hardships to which poor Fritz was exposed in the field, almost feeling angry and ashamed at themselves for being comfortable when he had to endure so much--as they knew from all the accounts published in the newspapers of the sufferings which the invading armies had to put up with, although Fritz himself made light of his physical grievances.
At Christmas-tide they were sad enough at his absence, with the memory of the lost Eric also to make that merry-making time for others doubly miserable to them; but, on the dawn of the new year, their hopes began to brighten with the receipt of every fresh piece of news from France concerning the progress of the war.
"The end cannot be far off now," they said to one another in mutual consolation, so as to cheer up each other's drooping spirits.

"Surely the campaign cannot last much longer!" The last Sunday in the month came, and on this day Madame Dort and Lorischen went to the Marien Kirche to service.
Previously they had been in the habit of attending the Dom Kirche, from the fact of Eric's liking to see, first as a child and afterwards as a growing boy, the great astronomical clock whose queer-looking eyes rolled so very curiously with the swing of the pendulum backwards and forwards each second; but, now, they went to the other house of God for a different reason.