the leaders in his chosen science, chemistry, and is Justus
Liebig's successor in the Munich University.

My second friend was a young Pole who devoted himself eagerly to
Egyptology, and whom Lepsius had introduced as a professional comrade.
He called me Georg and I him Mieczy (his name was Mieczyslaw).

So, during those hard winters, I did not lack friendship. But they also
wove into my life something else which lends their memory a melancholy
charm.

The second daughter of my mother's Belgian niece, who had married in
Berlin the architect Fritz Hitzig, afterwards President of the Academy
of Arts, was named Eugenie and nicknamed "Nenny."

If ever any woman fulfilled the demands of the fairy tale, "White
as snow and black as ebony," it was she. Only the "red as blood" was
lacking, for usually but a faint roseate hue tinged her cheeks. Her
large blue eyes had an innocent, dreamy, half-melancholy expression,
which I was not the only person who found unspeakably charming.
Afterwards it seemed to me, in recalling her look, that she beheld the
fair boy Death, whose lowered torch she was so soon to follow.

About the time that I returned to Berlin seriously ill she had just left
boarding-school, and it is difficult to describe the impression she made
when I saw her for the first time; yet I found in the opening rose all
that had lent the bud so great a charm.

I am not writing a romance, and shall not permit the heart to beautify
or transfigure the image memory retains, yet I can assert that
Nenny lacked nothing which art and poesy attribute to the women who
allegorically personate the magic of Nature or the fairest emotions and
ideals of the human soul. In this guise poet, sculptor, or artist might
have represented Imagination, the Fairy Tale, Lyric Poetry, the Dream,
or Compassion.

The wealth of raven hair, the delicate lines of the profile, the scarlet
lips, the pearly teeth, the large, long-lashed blue eyes, whose colour
formed a startling contrast to the dark hair, the slender little hands
and dainty feet, united to form a beauty whose equal Nature rarely
produces. And this fair body contained a tender, loving, pure, childlike
heart, which longed for higher gifts than human life can bestow.

Thus she appeared before me like an apparition from a world opened
only to the poet. She came often, for she loved my mother, and rarely
approached my couch without a flower, a picture which pleased her, or a
book containin