On Friday afternoons we have no real work. Miss Cashen reads to us out of books that are not school books or we talk about anything we want to without raising our hands for permission. This afternoon Miss Cashen said, “I think it would be nice if we would all take a trip to Europe. Who knows anything about any European country?” Antoinette said she knew all about Italy because her father was born in Genoa and so was Columbus. Miss Cashen said that was most interesting and would Antoinette tell us what her father remembers best about living there. Antoinette said that what her father likes best about Italy is spaghetti, and he is always telling her mother that hers wasn’t nearly as good as what his mother made. Miss Cashen said of course, Italian spaghetti was very fine but Italy had other fine things: Art Galleries and wonderful old palaces and beautiful churches. I said that I knew about the churches. I described the marble cake that daddy’s friend serves when we have tea at her house. Miss Cashen said that we should go on to another country and we would come back to Italy another time. So she said France and asked us what France was famous for? Wesley said the French language and Margaret said perfume. She said that once her mother had a bottle of French perfume. A nice man brought it to her one afternoon and when her father came home, he was awfully mad and threw it out of the window and her mother was even madder. Then Miss Cashen said we mustn’t forget Germany. And then she said to me, “Hilda! Your family came from Germany and you speak a little German. Were you born there?” I said, “No, I was born in New York but nearly everyone else in my family were born in either Germany or Austria.” I told them that I know that Germany was a very beautiful country, full of forest and castles and cuckoo clocks and there was a man named Beethoven who wrote beautiful music and I had learned to play “Für Elise” which he wrote for a little girl named Elise. And I told them about the Rhine river and about the “Lorelei” who combed their golden hair on a special rock and the sailors who would crash their ships forgetting about the rocks because they had to see her. Miss Cashen thanked me and then we went to Spain. I raised my hand again and I said that I knew that there were bull fights in Spain and beautiful music called “Carmen.” I explained that “Carmen” is an Opera and that there is a song in it that my father sings when he is taking a bath, “The Toreador Song.” (I guess daddy sings in the bath tub because he can’t play his flute there, as it might get wet.) From Spain we jumped way up North to three lovely countries called Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Norway has wonderful forests and beautiful goats and cheese. The cheese is made from goats milk and it looks like the brown soap that Ito uses to scrub the kitchen and it tastes like the soap too. Norway is also famous for fish and for waterfalls and for beautiful lilacs in the springtime and for the Vikings. The Vikings were ugly men with beards and swords and spears who sailed all around the world grabbing other mens’ countries and wives.

Hilda wrote of the Lorelei song in her April 8th entry. My grandmother too referred to it in her writing, although I’m only realizing it now. In a story about her youth, she wrote of telling a man who was flirting with her that even if he had “Lorelei hair” she would refuse to listen. “Die Lorelei” is a famous German folk song from a poem by Heinrich Heine.