We got up at 7.20 this morning and by 9.20 were at the Haupt Bahnhof to catch our train for Bautzen. Got a fine detailed map of this and Dresden, including Drehsa, and this was most helpful in our quest for the birthplace of grandmutter. The way out was very beautiful, as always in this lovely, fertile, much-used and long settled land. Peg does not think it was as pretty as the Marburg country but I think it was. The fields were usually larger, there was a much greater area of woods, the tops of hills were mostly woods, forests, beautifully kept, here of fir and pine, with borders of beech and birch—a few larch and spruce. The fields are fenceless, with the usual small square stones as 'land-marks' between properties. A church on the cot or saddle of the low hills. Villages nestling along the ever-running streams or on the hillsides. Most beautiful. We also passed huge paper mills and great breweries.

At long last we got to Bautzen, a huge fine town. Castles, fortresses, river, market-places, museums, theatres, fine streets—a big town we should call it. There are scores and scores of villages around it. We got a taxi. The lad, who was not smart or shaven, did not impress us favourably at first. In fact, at one stage, out in the country, when both he and we thought we were lost, we were just a bit scared. And indeed, he had us quite at his mercy. He did not understand one word of English, and but little of our combined German. However, we got to the long-talked-of Drehsa. We had found, at last, the village that Peggy had sought, where her mother was born. A pretty little place, large houses of the alte haus type, crowded together along the stream, and dominated by the Schloss (castle) of some Duke. We drove to the schoolhouse, and spoke to several people. They were not so smiling and sunny as those in other parts. Perhaps in these outback villages those who speak English are still hated as enemies. But one woman was very nice. The women and men we saw everywhere as they worked in the fields. One got a fine idea of what is meant by a 'peasant people'. We went to the school. No-one there. It was not the school that grandmutter went to, but we were on the roads she trod, and the woods and the fields where she played.

Then the schoolteacher came. Some one had sent for her. Such a nice, rosy-cheeked, strong and hearty girl, from Berlin. She liked Drehsa for 'a little while'. She complimented Peggy on her German and the two chattered away like magpies. She took us to a man’s house, and he told us where Peter Kaiser, the Burgomeister had lived, and where Georg Kaiser, Burgomeister also, had lived. But now the Kaisers do not live there. So we went to see it, and took photos of it—the house where grandmutter had been a girl with her brothers and sisters, four of whom had gone to Australia, and she the only one left. And I photographed the geese in the lane by the house and the stream and the street. There are no fences; one walks to one house through another, as at Niedergrenzebach. Then we went up to the Schloss, and we said goodbye to the little pleasant Berliner teacher and we set off back.