ater entered that other world which she
had regarded as her true home even while here. Her beloved image occupies
the most sacred place in the shrine of my memory.

I denied myself the pleasure of introducing her character in one of my
novels, for I felt that if I should succeed in limning it faithfully the
modern reader would be justified in considering her an impossible figure
for our days. She would perhaps have suited a fairy tale; and when I
created Bianca in The Elixir I gave her Nenny's form. The gratitude which
I owe her will accompany me to my life's end, for it was she who brought
to my sick-room the blue sky, sunlight, and the thousand gifts of a
blooming Garden of Eden.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE SUMMERS OF MY CONVALESCENCE.

While I spent the winters in my mother's house in industrious work and
pleasant social life, the summers took me out of the city into the open
air. I always went first with my faithful nurse and companion to Wildbad;
the remainder of the warm season I spent on the Elbe, sometimes with my
mother, sometimes with my aunt.

I used the Wildbad springs in all seventeen times. For two summers, aided
by a servant, I descended from a wheel-chair into the warm water; in the
third I could dispense with assistance; and from the fourth for several
lustra I moved unchecked with a steady step. After a long interval, owing
to a severe relapse of the apparently conquered disease, I returned to
them.

The Wurtemberg Wildbad is one of the oldest cures in Germany. The legend
of the Count Mirtemberg, who discovered its healing powers by seeing a
wild boar go down to the warm spring to wash its wound, has been rendered
familiar by Uhland to every German. Ulrich von Hutten also used it. It
rises in a Black Forest valley inclosed by stately mountains, a little
stream, the Enz, crystal clear, and abounding in trout.

The small town on both banks of the river expands, ere the Enz loses
itself in the leafage, into the Kurplatz, where one stately building of
lightred sandstone adjoins another. The little white church stands at the
left. But the foil, the background for everything, is the beautiful
foliage, which is as beneficial to the eyes as are the springs to the
suffering body. This fountain of health has special qualities. The
Swabian says, "just right, like Wildbad." It gushes just the right degree
of heat for the bath from the gravelly sand. After bathing early in the
morning I rested an hour, and whe