us behavior of a few hens left in the high coop at one side, it was
plain that what remained of the garden was now a chicken slaughteryard.
There was one well-grown tree, and the boy said it was of the poet's
time; but when he let them into the house, he became vague as to the
room where Heine was born; it was certain only that it was somewhere
upstairs and that it could not be seen. The room where they stood was
the frame-maker's shop, and they bought of him a small frame for a
memorial. They bought of the butcher's boy, not so commercially, a
branch of lilac; and they came away, thinking how much amused Heine
himself would have been with their visit; how sadly, how merrily he
would have mocked at their effort to revere his birthplace.

They were too old if not too wise to be daunted by their defeat, and
they drove next to the old court garden beside the Rhine where the poet
says he used to play with the little Veronika, and probably did not. At
any rate, the garden is gone; the Schloss was burned down long ago;
and nothing remains but a detached tower in which the good Elector
Jan Wilhelm, of Heine's time, amused himself with his many mechanical
inventions. The tower seemed to be in process of demolition, but an
intelligent workman who came down out of it, was interested in the
strangers' curiosity, and directed them to a place behind the Historical
Museum where they could find a bit of the old garden. It consisted of
two or three low trees, and under them the statue of the Elector by
which Heine sat with the little Veronika, if he really did. Afresh gale
blowing through the trees stirred the bushes that backed the statue, but
not the laurel wreathing the Elector's head, and meeting in a neat point
over his forehead. The laurel wreath is stone, like the rest of the
Elector, who stands there smirking in marble ermine and armor, and
resting his baton on the nose of a very small lion, who, in the
exigencies of foreshortening, obligingly goes to nothing but a tail
under the Elector's robe.

This was a prince who loved himself in effigy so much that he raised
an equestrian statue to his own renown in the market-place, though he
modestly refused the credit of it, and ascribed its erection to the
affection of his subjects. You see him therein a full-bottomed wig,
mounted on a rampant charger with a tail as big round as a barrel, and
heavy enough to keep him from coming down on his fore legs as long as he
likes to hold them