After spending three weeks of feasting at Moempelgard, his Highness set out for Stuttgart. The Moempelgarders bade him adieu with many expressions of loyal devotion. They found their new Duke and his handsome, decorous mistress, who played so finely the role of legal Duchess, an agreeable change after Leopold Eberhard's 'Persian Court' and its absurdities, and they would fain have induced Serenissimus to tarry in Moempelgard; but the King of Prussia had intimated his intention of visiting Ludwigsburg in September, and Eberhard Ludwig hurried back to receive his royal guest. But on arriving in Ludwigsburg his Highness fell ill, and Friedrich Wilhelm's visit was postponed till the following spring. The winter passed with little incident at Ludwigsburg. His Highness recovered rapidly from his actual illness, yet he did not regain his accustomed health and spirits, and thus the court festivities were both fewer and less brilliant than heretofore. The Landhofmeisterin's forebodings seemed to be infectious; a cloud hung over Ludwigsburg, and the people murmured ominously: 'His Highness wearies of her, and she has ill-wished him; he will die, and she will disappear with all the jewels and gold.' Doubtless, the Landhofmeisterin's actions lent colour to these wild reports. She had studied various theories of medicine--quaint, old, forgotten herb lore, absurd mediaeval magic. At first it had diverted her, then she grew credulous, and in the despair of knowing Eberhard Ludwig's love to be waning and his health broken, she resorted to the pitiful puerilities of love potions, life essences, and elixirs. Of course, for the brewing of these concoctions she required some extraordinary ingredients, and it was in the procuring of these that the gossip concerning her witch practices was revived and flourished. This prescription required the blood of a still-born male child; one old black-letter book recommended the heart of a yellow hen; another ordered the life-warm entrails of a black fighting-cock; a fourth prescription commanded the admixture of hairs from a dead man's beard! These ingredients mixed with herbs plucked in churchyards at midnight, or spices brought directly from the East, and with seven times distilled water, and suchlike, made a life elixir, or an infallible love potion, or again a cure for this or that disease. Among the many absurdities of ignorance some of the accumulated wisdom of experience may have crept into the old recipes: a real cure for a fever, or the application of a gold ring to an inflamed eyelid. Superstition said that the ring was the marvel-worker; possibly it was some quality in the gold, some even-as-yet-undiscovered power of certain metals upon the human body, and which experience may have taught the old village woman and the wandering quack. But for the most part the Graevenitz's potions were harmless absurdities, yet she believed, and so did others, in their efficacy.