How was it possible, you will ask, that such an eternal similarity
should have marked their dispositions? The answer is an easy one. The
fraeulein was deaf, perfectly destitute of hearing. The last recorded
act of her auditory nerves was on the occasion of some public rejoicing,
when twenty-four large guns were discharged in a few seconds of time,
and by the reverberation broke every window in Gdttingen; the old lady,
who was knitting at the time, merely stopped her work and called out
'Come in!' thinking it was a tap at the room door. To her malady, then,
was it owing that she so perfectly resembled the professor, her
brother. She watched him with an anxious eye; his face was the dial that
regulated every hour of her existence; and as the telegraph repeats the
signal that is made to it, yet knows not the interpretation of the sign,
so did she signalise the passing emotions of his mind long perhaps after
her own could take interest in the cause.

Nothing had a stranger effect, however, than to listen to the
professor's conversation, to which the assent of the deaf old lady
chimed in at short and regular intervals. For years long she had been
in the habit of corroborating everything he said, and continued the
practice now from habit; it was like a clock that struck the hour when
all its machinery had run down. And so, whether the Hofrath descanted
on some learned question of Greek particles, some much-disputed fact of
ancient history, or, as was more often the case, narrated with German
broadness some little anecdote of his student life, the old lady's 'Ja,
ja, den sah ich selbst; da war ich auch!' (Yes, yes, I saw it myself;
I was there, too!) bore testimony to the truth of Tacitus or Herodotus,
or, more remarkable still, to these little traits of her brother's
youthful existence, which, to say the least, were as well
uncorroborated.

The Hofrath had passed his life as a bachelor--a circumstance which
could not fail to surprise, for his stories were generally of his love
adventures and perils; and all teemed with dissertations on the great
susceptibility of his heart, and his devoted admiration of female
beauty--weaknesses of which it was plain he felt vain, and loved to hear
authenticated by his old associates. In this respect Blumenbach indulged
him perfectly--now recalling to his memory some tender scene, or some
afflicting separation, which invariably drew him into a story.

If these little reminiscences posse