ordan's lessons were over, absorbed in wonder and interest, till roof
and pillars seemed transferred to broad-leaved palm-trees, and the noise
of the streets to the roar of the sea--a sound he only knew in his
dreams; and this delight in what was foreign and unfamiliar never wore
off, but led him to become, by reading, intimately acquainted with the
countries whence all these stores came, and with the men by whom they
were collected.

Thus the first months of his life in the capital fled rapidly away; and
it was well for him that he took so much interest in his studies, for
Fink proved right in one respect. In spite of the daily meal in the
stately dining-room, Anton remained as great a stranger as ever to the
principal and his family. He was too rational, indeed, to murmur at
this, but he could not avoid feeling depressed by it; for, with the
enthusiasm of youth, he was ready to revere his chief as the ideal of
mercantile greatness. He admired his sagacity, decision, energy, and
inflexible uprightness, and would have been devoted to him heart and
soul, but that he so seldom saw him. When the merchant was not engaged
by business, he lived for his sister, whom he most tenderly loved. For
her he kept a carriage and horses which he himself never used, and gave
evening parties to which Anton and his colleagues were not invited. Gay
equipages rolled in one after the other, liveried servants ran up and
down stairs, and graceful shadows flitted across the windows, while
Anton sat in his little upper chamber, and yearned eagerly after the
brilliant gayeties in which he had no part. True, his reason told him
that they did not belong to men of his class, but at nineteen reason is
not always supreme; and many a time he went back with a sigh from his
window to his books, and tried to forget the alluring strains of the
quadrille and waltz in the descriptions of the lion's roar and the
bull-frog's croak in the far-off tropics.

CHAPTER VI.

The Baron of Rothsattel had moved to his town residence. It was not
indeed large, but its furniture, the arabesques on its walls, the
arrangement of its hangings were so graceful, that it ranked as a model
of comfort and elegance. The baron had made all his preparations in
silence. At length the day came when the new carriage stopped at the
door, and, lifting down his wife, he led her through the suite of
apartments to her own little boudoir, all fitted up with white silk.
Enchanted bey