see Wirtemberg
clothed in the fairest raiment. She journeyed through the smiling
valleys, she passed beside the peaceful Neckar river. Her way led her
near to Rottenburg, and she turned from her road to visit the Neuhaus.
Here she found ruin. Madame de Ruth had bequeathed her property to
Zollern, and while he lived the place had been tended with pious care;
but he too was dead, and the Neuhaus had passed to an heir-at-law who
knew not, and if he had known, would not have comprehended, the loving
memory which caused the dilapidated mansion to be treasured. It is always
so; there is no sadder thing than the melancholy of a place, once sacred
and beloved, which has fallen into the chill hands of the indifference of
another generation.

The Neuhaus was turned farm: the upper rooms were used as hay-lofts, and
in that long, panelled living-room, which had seen Wilhelmine von
Graevenitz's strange marriage, a peasant woman cooked, scolding her brood
of children. She stared at the Graevenitz.

'Oh yes! this is my husband's farm. What do you want with me? See the
house? There is not much to see,' she said suspiciously. A gulden changed
her tone.

'Certainly; look if you like,' she said, and followed the sad visitant
from room to room, hands on hips, and shrill voice explaining how the
rats were so bad in the house that she and her husband would have to
leave next month.

'Is there a grave here? a grave surrounded by a stone wall? No? But it
was consecrated ground, it cannot have been destroyed?' The Graevenitz
spoke quietly, but she could have wept aloud.

Yes, the woman said, there was a bit of walled-off land, but it did not
belong to them. There was a gate, and they had not the key. Perhaps there
was a grave there; the grass grew so high you could not tell. She led her
visitor through the neglected garden which Spring, the glorious gardener,
had yet made fair with blossom and the budding lilac. The Graevenitz
peered through the bars of the graveyard gate. Ah, thank God! who sends
Spring to garnish the graves of the forgotten dead! The tombs were hidden
by a fair coronal of waving grasses, and the redthorns above made a
baldaquin more beautiful than the work of man's hand.

'Forgotten, yet so peaceful,' she murmured as she turned away.

'Did you speak, lady?' said the peasant woman; but the Graevenitz shook
her head.

'Only to myself; only to myself always now,' she answered.

At Tuebingen no one paid heed to the tra