out a round table. As soon
as we made our appearance they all signed to us to keep silence,
and pointed toward the other end of the garden, where in a large,
vine-wreathed arbor two beautiful ladies were sitting opposite each
other at a table. One was singing, while the other accompanied her
on the guitar. Between them stood a pleasant-looking gentleman, who
occasionally beat time with a small baton. The setting sun shone
through the vine-leaves, upon the fruits and flasks of wine with which
the table was provided, and upon the plump, white shoulders of the
lady with the guitar. The other one grimaced so that she looked
convulsed, but she sang in Italian in so extremely artistic a manner
that the sinews in her neck stood out like cords.

Just as she was executing a long cadenza with her eyes turned up to
the skies, while the gentleman beside her held his baton suspended in
the air waiting the moment when she would fall into the beat again,
the garden gate was flung open, and a girl looking very much heated,
and a young man with a pale, delicate face, entered, quarreling
violently. The conductor, startled, stood with raised baton like a
petrified conjurer, although the singer had some time before snapped
short her long trill and had arisen angrily from the table. All the
others turned upon the new arrivals in a rage. "You savage," some one
at the round table called out, "you have interrupted the most perfect
tableau of the description which the late Hoffmann gives on page 347
of the _Ladies' Annual_ for 1816 of the finest of Hummel's pictures
exhibited in the autumn of 1814 at the Berlin Art-Exposition!" But
it did no good. "What do I care," the young man retorted, "for your
tableau of tableaux! My picture any one may have; my sweetheart I
choose to keep for myself. Oh, you faithless, false-hearted girl!" he
went on to his poor companion, "you fine critic to whom a painter is
nothing but a tradesman, and a poet only a money-maker; you care for
nothing save flirtation! May you fall to the lot, not of an honest
artist, but of an old Duke with a diamond-mine and beplastered with
gold and silver foil! Out with the cursed note that you tried to hide
from me! What have you been scribbling? From whom did it come, or to
whom is it going?"

But the girl resisted him steadfastly, and the more the other young
men present tried to soothe and pacify the angry lover, the more
he scolded and threatened; particularly as the girl herse