rtz Mountains,
making a little tour, for it was semester, and all the classes were
closed in the University. There was Tieck, and Feldtbourg the Dane, and
Upsal, and old Langendorf of Jena, and Grotchen von Zobelschein, and
Mina Upsal, and Caroline, and Martha there--she, poor thing, was getting
deaf at the time, and could not take the same pleasure as the rest of
us. She was always stupid, you know.'

Here he looked over at her, when she immediately responded--

'Yes, yes, what he says is true.'

'Each morning we used to set off up the mountains, botanising and
hammering among the limestone rocks, and seeking for cryptogamia and
felspar, lichens and jungermannia and primitive rock--mingling our
little diversions with pleasant talk about the poets, and reciting
verses to one another from Hans Sachs and the old writers, and chatting
away about Schiller: the "Lager" was just come out, and more than one
among us could scarcely believe it was Frederick did it.

'Tieck and I soon found that we were rivals; for before a week each of
us was in love with Caroline. Now, Ludwig was a clever fellow, and had a
thousand little ways of ingratiating himself with a pretty woman--and a
poetess besides. He could come down every day to breakfast with some ode
or sonnet, or maybe a dream; and then he was ready after dinner with
his bit of poetry, which sometimes, when he found a piano, he 'd set
to music; or maybe in the evening he'd invent one of those strange
rigmarole stories of his, about a blue-bottle fly dying for love of a
white moth or some superannuated old drone bee, retiring from public
life, and spending his days reviling the rest of the world. You know
his nonsense well; but somehow one could not help listening, and, what's
worse, feeling interest in it. As for Caroline, she became crazed about
gnats and spiders, and fleas, and would hear for whole days long the
stories of their loves and sorrows.

'For some time I bore up as well as I could. There was a limit--Heaven
be thanked!--to that branch of the creation; and as he had now got
down to millepedes, I trusted that before the week was over he 'd have
reached mites, beyond which it was impossible he could be expected
to proceed. Alas! I little knew the resources of his genius; for one
evening, when I thought him running fast aground, he sat down in the
midst of us, and began a tale of the life and adventures of the
Herr Baron von Beetroot, in search of his lost love the