_."

The cook's melodies undoubtedly charmed back his home to him, though
in colours less glorious and alluring to himself, perhaps, than to the
artists, whether they had been in Italy or not. Frederick leaned his head
back and closed his eyes. The dining-room was filled with the fumes of
cigars and cigarettes, and the electric bulbs shone as in a mist.
Frederick's thoughts carried him far, far away. His arm hung at his side
limply, while a Simon Arzt cigarette burned to a stump between his
fingers--throughout his adventures, his silver cigarette case had
remained safe in his pocket.

Before his inner vision rose the coasts and blue gulfs of Italy, the
brown Doric temples of Paestum and the cliffs of Amalfi, Sorrento, and
Capri. He was standing on the Posilipo. He was with Doctor Dorn in the
loggia of the zoologic station for deep-sea researches, which Hans von
Marees had decorated. In Rome, Frederick had sat over many a bottle of
wine with Hans von Marees and Otto, who died while working on the Luther
Memorial in Berlin. He saw himself in the famous Est Est Cafe in Rome,
or visiting the malaria patients in the hospital on the Capitol, or
promenading in the sunshine on Monte Pincio with a deaf and dumb
sculptor, with whom he then went to an afternoon concert. He had laughed
because the artist explained that he did not hear the music with his
ears, but felt it, or rather felt the drum alone, in his belly.

In that period of his life, Frederick had been undergoing a crisis. But
a little more and his preoccupation with Goethe's "Italian Journey," his
intercourse with the artists, and the vast number of his impressions of
sublime art would have turned him aside from science. But one day he
chanced to meet Mrs. Von Thorn and her daughter Angele. He became
engaged, and there was no question now of a change of profession. Angele
was beautiful, and those days, when he read aloud to her chapters from
Goethe, or inspired and inspiring passages from Winckelmann, or recited
Hoelderlin, or held forth to her on the masterworks in the Vatican, were
full of never-to-be-repeated romantic asininity. They bought engagement
rings of a jeweller on the Corso. Where was his ring? He had removed it
from his finger, and, like all his other possessions, it had gone down
forever in the cabin of the _Roland_.

Frederick again felt that sensation of hot waves rising from his breast
to his eyes. This time the emotion was a soft one, a feeling of