One autumn Sohn came to us accompanied by his friend, the great artist, Lessing. The latter, a very handsome man, like so many of the followers of Art, was extremely taciturn. He was a good sportsman, shooting his deer almost daily. Much as I dislike all sport, my admiration of the artist induced me to bring him the proverbial good luck, by meeting him as if by chance when he set out in the early morn with his gun. As I passed with a smiling though silent greeting, I thought to myself that had he but known my horror of the slaughter of innocent dumb creatures, the great painter would have been still more flattered by this attention on the part of the daughter of the house. This was after Otto’s death, and Lessing made a sketch of the grave for my mother, with the wonderful precision in rendering every detail that characterised him. Every branch of the trees overshadowing the tomb was portrayed with lifelike fidelity; Lessing’s scrupulous exactitude refusing to sanction the slightest deviation from the original. Every bough, every twig must be in its place; even in a landscape his veracity would not tolerate any suppression or addition. His realism, his close copying of Nature, was coupled with a fear of accepting any other teacher; and he had always been afraid to visit Italy, lest he should sacrifice something of his own originality to the involuntary imitation of the Old Masters. When I grew up, Sohn wished to make a portrait of me, as he often saw me, sitting in the shadow of a tree, a straw hat on my head, in my simple morning attire. But it was unfortunately quite another picture that was wanted--in evening dress, in the drawing-room--just something that I hated, and that seemed to me so little like myself. Sohn, who had known me from a child, understood this, and his idea was the true one. I shall always regret that picture that never was painted, it would have shown me exactly as I was, at that period of my life. I was the child of the forest, the forest-song, and have never wished to be aught else. The untamed and untamable in my nature, from which some good folk shrank in alarm, was just what pleased our kind artist-friend. Others might find my high spirits fatiguing, they were never so to him. My spontaneity, my frankness, refreshed him, and his heart melted towards this poor little child of Nature, who was to be forced against her will to become conventional--and even, without her knowing it, was being already educated to fit her for a throne! Anything rather than that, I should have said--for choice, a cottage, a little house hidden away in a wood--for I was not ambitious, at least my ambition took quite another direction. What could all worldly pomp mean to me, who had revelled in the forest-splendours, in the glories of Nature! The beeches of our lofty avenues would dwarf the finest columns ever reared to support a roof, and how poor and insignificant the hubbub of the crowd must sound,