led of his madness, and probably at this moment happily betrothed,
if not already a husband, there nevertheless lurked a certain
uncomfortable feeling in my mind, and I caught myself involuntarily
shaking my head as though there were something not quite right about
it. My quick-witted wife seemed to discern what was going on within me,
but as though the subject of my musings were too low and common to bear
discussion, she never referred to the picture, and treated me with a
gentleness and consideration befitting a penitent; in the spirit, in
short, of the beautiful axiom, 'If a man have fallen, let love bring
him back to duty.'

"On the following morning I was anxious to go to work, with fresh
energies, at a new picture which I had already mentally composed; but I
discovered that there was something wrong with me--there was still that
story to unravel. What I should have liked best would have been to have
gone at once to Mynheer Jan, and heard the truth, but he never got up
before ten o'clock in the morning; so I lounged off again to the
exhibition, that I might study the picture I had too hurriedly looked
at the previous day, and was not a little annoyed at being reminded by
the closed door that it was Saturday, the day when the pictures are
hung and the public excluded. The official told me that Herr van
Kuylen's picture had been taken back to his studio in the course of the
previous evening.

"To while away the hours till ten, I turned off through the arcades,
and betook myself to the English garden, where I never found time long.
It is so celebrated that I need not praise it; but I venture to say
there are not many, even among our good old Munich inhabitants, who
know it at the time of its very greatest beauty, and that is early on
an autumn, or late-summer morning, when it is as solemn and deserted
as a primeval forest, and you can wander along the lofty avenues
of shade without meeting a human creature. The gold-daisied meadows
are luxuriant in the sun, the trees have lost none of their gorgeous
foliage, the sun-light falls, I might say, in _pasto_ on the
mirror-like ponds, and the magical dreamy silence thrills with the
quiet rushing of the Isar, and the light and noiseless hopping of birds
and squirrels from branch to branch. There was no one to be seen on the
lonely benches, unless, perhaps, a student preparing for his
examination, or some poor poet meditating his love-songs. As to my
colleagues the landscape