While thus they chatted on, the great world without and all its mighty interests seemed forgotten by them. France might have taken another choleric fit, and been in march upon the Rhine; England might have once more covered the ocean with her fleets, and scattered to the waves the wreck of another Trafalgar; Russia might be pouring down her hordes from the Don and Dnieper--little chance had they of knowing aught of these things! The orchards that surrounded the ramparts shut out the rest of Europe, and they lived as remote from all the collisions of politics and the strife of nations as though the University had been in another planet. I must not forget the old Hofrath Froriep, Ordentliche-Professor von-- Heaven knows what! No one ever saw his collegium (lecture-room); no one ever heard him lecture. He had been a special tutor to the Princes--as the Dukes of Cumberland and Cambridge were then called--about forty years ago, and he seemed to live upon the memory of those great days when a Royal Highness took notes beside his chair, and when he addressed his class as ‘Princes and Gentlemen!’ What pride he felt in his clasp of the Guelph, and an autograph letter of the Herzog von Clarence, who once paid him a visit at his house in Gottingen! It was a strange thing to hear the royal family of England spoken thus of among foreigners, who neither knew our land nor its language. One was suddenly recalled to the recollection of that Saxon stock from which our common ancestry proceeded--the bond of union between us, and the source from which so many of the best traits of English character take their origin. The love of truth, the manly independence, the habits of patient industry which we derived from our German blood are not inferior to the enterprising spirit and the chivalrous daring of Norman origin. But to return to the Hofrath, or Privy Councillor Froriep, for so was he most rigidly styled. I remember him so well as he used to come slowly down the garden-walk, leaning on his sister’s arm. He was the junior by some years, but no one could have made the discovery now; the thing rested on tradition, however, and was not disputed. The Fräulein Martha von Froriep was the daguerreotype of her brother. To see them sitting opposite each other was actually ludicrous; not only were the features alike, but the expressions tallied so completely that it was as if one face reflected the other. Did the professor look grave, the Fräulein Martha’s face was serious; did he laugh, straightway her features took a merry cast; if his coffee was too hot, or did he burn his fingers with his pipe, the old lady’s sympathies were with him still. The Siamese twins were on terms of distant acquaintanceship, compared with the instinctive relation these two bore each other.