Rhine
must have destroyed in a great measure the patriotic feeling of Western
Germany. The peasantry were sold as mercenaries; the nobles, little
better, took arms in a cause many of them hated and detested----'

'I must stop you here,' said he, with a smile; 'not that you would or
could say that which should wound my feelings, but you might hurt your
own when you came to know that he to whom you are speaking served in
that army. Yes, sir, I was a soldier of Napoleon.'

Although nothing could be more unaffectedly easy than his manner as he
spoke, I feared I might already have said too much; indeed, I knew not
the exact expressions I had used, and there was a pause of some minutes,
broken at length by the colonel saying--

'Let us walk towards the town; for if I mistake not they close the gates
of the Park at midnight, and I believe we are the only persons remaining
here now.'

Chattering of indifferent matters, we arrived at the hotel; and after
accepting an invitation to accompany the baron the next day to Wilhelms
Hoehe, I wished him good-night and retired.

CHAPTER XXXI. THE BARON'S STORY

Every one knows how rapidly acquaintance ripens into intimacy when mere
accident throws two persons together in situations where they have no
other occupation than each other's society; days do the work of years,
confidences spring up where mere ceremonies would have been interchanged
before, and in fact a freedom of thought and speech as great as we
enjoy in our oldest friendships. Such in less than a fortnight was the
relation between the baron and myself. We breakfasted together every
morning, and usually sallied forth afterwards into the country,
generally on horseback, and only came back to dinner--a ramble in the
Park concluding our day.

I still look back to those days as amongst the pleasantest of my life;
for although the temper of my companion's mind was melancholic, it
seemed rather the sadness induced by some event of his life than the
depression resulting from a desponding temperament--a great difference,
by the way; as great as between the shadow we see at noonday and the
uniform blackness of midnight. He had evidently seen much of the
world, and in the highest class; he spoke of Paris as he knew it in
the gorgeous time of the Empire--of the Tuileries, when the salons were
crowded with kings and sovereign princes; of Napoleon, too, as he saw
him, wet and cold, beside the bivouac fire, interchanging a ru