ding
to court, neither singing nor the clinking of beakers could please me. I
went about like a sleep-walker, and it seemed as if I had no right to
live without my father. Then--it is now just two years ago--a messenger
brought from Weimar a letter which had come from Italy with several
others, addressed to our most gracious sovereign; it contained the news
that our lost brother was still alive, lying sick and wretched in the
hospital at Bergamo. A kind nun had written for him, and we now learned
that on the journey from Valencia to Livorno Louis had been captured by
corsairs and dragged to Tunis. How much suffering he endured there, with
what danger he at last succeeded in obtaining his liberty, you shall
learn later. He escaped to Italy on a Genoese galley. His feet carried
him as far as Bergamo, but he could go no farther, and now lay ill,
perhaps dying, among sympathizing strangers. I set out at once and did
not spare horseflesh on the way to Bergamo, but though there were many
strange and beautiful things to be seen on my way, they afforded me
little pleasure, the thought of Louis, so dangerously ill, saddened my
joyous spirits. Every running brook urged me to hasten, and the lofty
mountains seemed like jealous barriers. When once beyond St. Gotthard I
felt less anxious, and as I rode down from Bellinzona to Lake Lugano, and
the sparkling surface of the water beyond the city smiled at me like a
blue eye, forgot my grief for a time, waved my hat, and sung a song. In
Bergamo I found my brother, alive, but enfeebled in mind and body, weak,
and without any desire to take up the burden of life again. He had been
in good hands, and after a few weeks we were able to travel
homeward--this time I went through beautiful Tyrol. Louis's strength
daily increased, but the wings of his soul had been paralyzed by
suffering. Alas, for long years he had dug and carried heavy loads, with
chains on his feet, beneath a broiling sun. Chevalier von Brand could not
long endure this hard fate, but Louis, while in Tunis, forgot both how to
laugh and weep, and which of the two can be most easily spared?

"Even when he saw my mother again, he could not shed a tear, yet his
whole body--and surely his heart also--trembled with emotion. Now he
lives quietly at the castle. In the prime of manhood he is an old man,
but he is beginning to accommodate himself to life, only he can't bear
the sight of a strange face. I had a hard battle with him, for a