out the least embarrassment.

CHAPTER XII.

THE PRIDE OF OUR PLANET.

The season at Carlsbad was unusually brilliant. Seldom had so many of
the nobility and so many adventurers assembled at the Baths. To the
second class, but perhaps also to the first, belonged Sonnenkamp, who
arrived with a great retinue, wife and daughter, son, tutor,
gouvernante, and a number of servants, the latter, however, not dressed
in livery, but modestly, in plain citizens' clothes.

The Count, as well as Clodwig and Bella, had been at the Baths a week
when Sonnenkamp's household arrived. Clodwig took his young friend,
with some solemnity, to the spring, and told how he himself had once
been brought thereby the philosopher, Schelling, who said to him,--

"Behold! this spring is the pride of our planet."

All conventional distinctions must cease before such a fountain of
health as this, Clodwig added, for it says to us,--You must leave your
lofty and your lowly dwellings; in my presence, all are alike high-born
and low-born. Clodwig had already caught the liberal tone.

On the very day of Sonnenkamp's arrival, a guest was departing whose
modesty was equal to the consideration in which he was held; it was
Weidmann. Eric met him just as he was drinking his last draught from
the spring. The relations between the Sovereign and this President of
the representatives, an unyielding opposer of the Court policy, long
furnished matter of conversation among the guests; the Sovereign had
twice invited him to his table, and addressed him several times when
they had met upon the morning walk. Statisticians differed somewhat in
regard to the latter point, some maintaining that these morning
conversations had taken place twice, others that they had occurred as
often as thrice, or even four times.

Again Eric's meeting with Weidmann was short and unsatisfactory, and he
disliked to be always reiterating his intention of visiting him.

Clodwig also presented Eric at once to an old friend of his, a
well-known banker of liberal education from the great business capital,
whom he met every year at some baths, either at Gastein or Ostend, if
not here, and with whom, on such occasions, he always spent many hours
of the day. The two men were both seventy years old, but the Banker had
all the restlessness of youth; he was as eager for knowledge as a
German student, and as talkative as a Frenchman in a