mbolical "coronation incident," setting forth his future relations
to his subjects. Of all those who believed him dead one human creature
only, save the grandfather, had sincerely sorrowed for him; a woman, in
tears as the funeral train passed by, with whom he had sympathetically
discussed his own merits. Till then he had forgotten the incident
which had exhibited him to her as the very genius of goodness and
strength; how, one day, driving with her country produce into the
market, and, embarrassed by the crowd, she had broken one of a hundred
little police rules, whereupon the officers were about to carry her
away to be fined, or worse, amid the jeers of the bystanders, always
ready to deal hardly with "the gipsy," at which precise [141] moment
the tall Duke Carl, like the flash of a trusty sword, had leapt from
the palace stair and caused her to pass on in peace. She had half
detected him through his disguise; in due time news of his reappearance
had been ceremoniously carried to her in her little cottage, and the
remembrance of her hung about him not ungratefully, as he went with
delight upon his way.

The first long stage of his journey over, in headlong flight night and
day, he found himself one summer morning under the heat of what seemed
a southern sun, at last really at large on the Bergstrasse, with the
rich plain of the Palatinate on his left hand; on the right hand
vineyards, seen now for the first time, sloping up into the crisp
beeches of the Odenwald. By Weinheim only an empty tower remained of
the Castle of Windeck. He lay for the night in the great whitewashed
guest-chamber of the Capuchin convent.

The national rivers, like the national woods, have a family likeness:
the Main, the Lahn, the Moselle, the Neckar, the Rhine. By help of
such accommodation as chance afforded, partly on the stream itself,
partly along the banks, he pursued the leisurely winding course of one
of the prettiest of these, tarrying for awhile in the towns, grey,
white, or red, which came in his way, tasting their delightful native
"little" wines, peeping into their old overloaded churches, inspecting
the church furniture, or trying the [142] organs. For three nights he
slept, warm and dry, on the hay stored in a deserted cloister, and,
attracted into the neighbouring minster for a snatch of church music,
narrowly escaped detection. By miraculous chance the grimmest lord of
Rosenmold was there within, recognised the youth