two days. The family were great Italian
travellers, and we had met in Rome more than twenty years before, when the
writer and the boys, whom I met again--the one as an officer of the
Prussian army, and the other as a Bonn student--were children together. At
dinner one evening at this new Sayn house, as we were tasting some Russian
dish of soured milk (the mother was a Russian), we reminded each other of
our ball on Twelfth Night at Rome, when the youngest of these boys
happened to become king "by the grace of the bean," and spent some hours
seated in state with gilt-paper crown and red-velvet mantle till he was
too sleepy to oversee his subjects' revels any longer; of a day when the
pope was to "create" several cardinals, and of the young "king's" unshaken
belief that _he_ would have the scarlet hat sent him if he only waited
long enough at the window to look out for the messengers, and of his
consequent watch all day, seeing the carriages pass and repass and the
bustle of a _festa_ go on, till the sunset flushed over St. Peter's in the
distance, and the disappointment became certain at last. Of not much more
manly pastimes did the Bonn student have to tell, for the slitting of
noses was then in high favor, and a bit of advice was gravely recounted as
having come from a doctor to an obstinate duellist, "not to get his nose
cut off a _fifth_ time, as the sewing had got so shaky by repetition that
he could not answer for the nose sticking on if touched once more." The
house was really beautiful, and furnished with a taste which had something
Parisian, and yet also something individual, about it. The parquet floors
of inlaid and polished wood used in Germany were here seen to their
greatest perfection in some of the rooms; but what most struck me was a
Moorish chamber lighted from above--a small, octagon room, with low divans
round the walls and an ottoman in the centre, with flowers in concealed
pots cunningly introduced into the middle of the cushions, while glass
doors, half screened by Oriental-looking drapery, led into a small grotto
conservatory with a fountain plashing softly among the tropical plants.
There was also a good collection of pictures in a gallery, besides the
paintings scattered through the living rooms; but the garden was perhaps
as much a gem to its owner's mind as anything in the house, as an
"English" garden always is to a foreigner. There, in the late afternoon of
that day, came one of the Prussian r