How long since have you forgotten that she who thus holds you entranced is the brunette, with features rather too bold than otherwise; that those eyes which now sparkle with the fire of mind seemed but half an hour ago to have a look of cold effrontery? Such is the charm of _esprit_; and without it the prettiest woman wants her greatest charm. A diamond she may be, and as bright and of purest water; but the setting, which gives such lustre to the stone, is absent, and half the brilliancy of the gem is lost to the beholder. Now, of all tongues ever invented by man, German is the most difficult and clumsy for all purposes of conversation. You may preach in it, you may pray in it, you may hold a learned argument, or you may lay down some involved and intricate statement--you may, if you have the gift, even tell a story in it, provided the hearers be patient, and some have gone so far as to venture on expressing a humorous idea in German; but these have been bold men, and their venturous conduct is more to be admired than imitated. At the same time, it is right to add that a German joke is a very wooden contrivance at best, and that the praise it meets with is rather in the proportion of the difficulty of the manufacture than of the superiority of the article--just as we admire those Indian toys carved with a rusty nail, or those fourth-string performances of Paganini and his followers. And now to come back to the students, whom mayhap you deem to have been forgotten by me all this time, but for whose peculiar illustration my digression was intended--it being neither more nor less than to show that if Frederica von Ettenheim turned half the heads in Göttingen, Messrs. Eisendecker and Mühry were of the number. What a feature it was of the little town, her coming to reside in it! What a sweet atmosphere of womanly gracefulness spread itself like a perfume through those old salons, whose dusty curtains and moth-eaten chairs looked like the fossils of some antediluvian furniture! With what magic were the old ceremonials of a professor’s reception exchanged for the easier habits of a politer world! The venerable dignitaries of the University felt the change, but knew not where it lay, and could not account for the pleasure they now experienced in the vice-rector’s soirees; while the students knew no bounds to the enthusiastic admiration, and ‘Die Ettenheim’ reigned in every heart in Göttingen.