attempts to win him, attempts as fruitless as unequivocal,
had at last gone off in rage and undisguised despair, after having
wrung her parrot's neck, for screaming from the window, day and night,
the name of the coy young count.

I was not able to learn more of this, nor of any other of his
adventures; he carefully avoided any conversation about women; still,
nothing he ever said could have led me to assume that he thought meanly
of them, or that he was suffering from any hidden wound, of which he
could not bear the probing.

Judging by the whole tenor of his conduct, I decided, that, striving as
he did, at aims so serious, he found no time for trifling flirtations,
and never had been touched by a deeper feeling. His mother had died
very soon after the birth of her first-born son, but he would
occasionally receive letters, addressed in a feminine hand, and he told
me they came from an old nurse of his, who had been as a second mother
to him. She was evidently very dear to him; but even of her he spoke
but little; eager discussions upon his own studies, or on mine, were
ever burning on his lips.

He was several years in advance of me, and when we parted in the
autumn, he went to pass his diplomatic examination at Berlin. We bid
each other a very affectionate farewell, without much hope of
continuous intercourse;--we knew that what we had hitherto exchanged,
no correspondence could have replaced. But we were young, and we parted
in the confident hope that life and its chances must, in some way or
other, bring us together again.

For many a long year, I heard nothing of him but his name; the last I
learned was from a newspaper, which stated that Count Ernest ---- had
been appointed secretary of Legation at Stockholm. Again a long time
elapsed, without the smallest tidings of him, and I confess that his
image had considerably faded in my memory, when it chanced, that, on a
pedestrian tour, I suddenly lit upon his name, printed upon a road-post
that pointed to a deep lane, all overgrown with brushwood, cutting at
right angles the road which I had taken. I stopped, and, as if by a
magician's wand, the country round me seemed metamorphosed.

Again the Rhine was rolling at my feet, and again I saw his straight
lithe figure, as he walked along, holding his hat in his hand, and
letting the fresh breeze from the current play among his luxuriant hair
of reddish gold; and those fine eyes of his, so full of thought, gazing
ove