‘Each morning we used to set off up the mountains, botanising and hammering among the limestone rocks, and seeking for cryptogamia and felspar, lichens and jungermannia and primitive rock--mingling our little diversions with pleasant talk about the poets, and reciting verses to one another from Hans Sachs and the old writers, and chatting away about Schiller: the “Lager” was just come out, and more than one among us could scarcely believe it was Frederick did it. ‘Tieck and I soon found that we were rivals; for before a week each of us was in love with Caroline. Now, Ludwig was a clever fellow, and had a thousand little ways of ingratiating himself with a pretty woman--and a poetess besides. He could come down every day to breakfast with some ode or sonnet, or maybe a dream; and then he was ready after dinner with his bit of poetry, which sometimes, when he found a piano, he ‘d set to music; or maybe in the evening he’d invent one of those strange rigmarole stories of his, about a blue-bottle fly dying for love of a white moth or some superannuated old drone bee, retiring from public life, and spending his days reviling the rest of the world. You know his nonsense well; but somehow one could not help listening, and, what’s worse, feeling interest in it. As for Caroline, she became crazed about gnats and spiders, and fleas, and would hear for whole days long the stories of their loves and sorrows. ‘For some time I bore up as well as I could. There was a limit--Heaven be thanked!--to that branch of the creation; and as he had now got down to millepedes, I trusted that before the week was over he ‘d have reached mites, beyond which it was impossible he could be expected to proceed. Alas! I little knew the resources of his genius; for one evening, when I thought him running fast aground, he sat down in the midst of us, and began a tale of the life and adventures of the Herr Baron von Beetroot, in search of his lost love the Fräulein von Cucumber. This confounded narrative had its scene in an old garden in Silesia, where there were incidents of real beauty and interest interwoven, ay, and verses that would make your heart thrill. Caroline could evidently resist no longer. The Baron von Beetroot was ever uppermost in her mind; and if she ate Gurken-salat, it brought the tears into her eyes. In this sad strait I wandered out alone one evening, and without knowing it reached the “Rase Mühle,” near Oltdorf. There I went in and ordered a supper; but they had nothing but thick-milk and kalte- schade. * * Thick-milk--a mess of sour cream thickened with sugar and crumbs of bread _Kallte-schade_--the same species of abomination, the only difference being beer, for cream, for the fluid.