ess"; sometimes "Many thanks for your beautiful dinner," or
anything you like. They speak Polish to each other and to their
servants, but they are such wonderful linguists that they always
address a guest in his own language. To their peasants, however, who
speak an unlearnable dialect, they are obliged always to have an
interpreter.

At six o'clock came tea from samovars four feet high and of the most
gorgeous repousse silver. Melons, fruit, and all sorts of bread are
served with this. Then at eight a supper, very heavy, very sumptuous,
very luxurious.

The whole day had been charming, exhilarating, different from anything
we had ever seen before; but there was to follow something which
impressed itself upon my excitable nerves with a fascination so
bewildering that I can think of but one thing which would give me the
same amount of heavenly satisfaction. This would be to have Theodore
Thomas conduct the Chicago orchestra in the "Tannhaeuser" overture in
the Court of Honor at the World's Fair some night with a full moon.

But to return. The Princess excused herself to her Protestant guests
after supper, and then her family, with the servants and all the
guests who wished, assembled in the winter garden to sing hymns to the
Virgin. The winter garden is like a gigantic conservatory four stories
high. It connects the two wings of the castle on the ground floor, and
all the windows and galleries of the floors above overlook it.

It is the most beautiful spot even in the daytime that I ever saw
connected with any house built for man. But at night to look down upon
its beauty, with its palms, its tall ferns, its growing, climbing,
waving vines and flowering shrubs, with its divine odors and
fragrances and sweet dampnesses from mosses and lovely, moist, green,
growing things, is to have one's soul filled with a poetry undreamed
of on the written page.

The candles dotting the soft gloom, the spray from the fountains
blowing in the air and tinkling into their marble basins, the tones of
the grand organ rumbling and soaring up to us, the moonlight pouring
through the great glass dome and filtering through the waving green
leaves, dimpling on the marble statues and making trembling shades and
shadows upon the earnest faces of the worshippers, the penetrating
sadness of their minor hymns--all the sights and sounds and fragrances
of this winter garden made of that hour "one to be forever marked with
a white stone."

V