“We feel a light has left the world, A nameless sort of treasure, As though one pluck'd the crimson heart From out the rose of pleasure. I could forgive the fate that made Me poor and young to-morrow, To hare again the soul that played So tenderly in sorrow, So buoyantly in happiness. Ay, I would brook deceiving, And even the deceiver bless, Just to go on believing!” “Still,” thought I, “one ought to maintain self-respect; one should not willingly make himself a dupe.” And then I began to wish that Vaterchen had come up, and that Tinte-fleck was rushing towards me with tears in her eyes, and my money-bag in her hands. I wanted to forget them. I tried in a hundred ways to prevent them crossing my memory; but though there is a most artful system of artificial “mnemonics” invented by some one, the Lethal art has met no explorer, and no man has ever yet found out the way to shut the door against bygones. I believe it is scarcely more than five miles to Bregenz from Lindau, and yet I was almost as many hours on the road. I sat down, perhaps twenty times, lost in revery; indeed, I'm not very sure that I did n't take a sound sleep under a spreading willow, so that, when I reached the inn, the company was just going in to dinner at the _table d'hôte_. Simple and unpretentious as that board was, the company that graced it was certainly distinguished, being no less than the Austrian field-marshal in command of the district, and the officers of his staff. To English notions, it seemed very strange to see a nobleman of the highest rank, in the proudest state of Europe, seated at a dinner-table open to all comers, at a fraction less than one shilling a head, and where some of the government officials of the place daily came.