Small wonder that we children listened with beating hearts and cheeks aflame to the story of the stirring times, still so near to the elder generation, members of our family too being yet alive, great-aunts and great-uncles among us to that day, who had also lived through them, and the very walls of our castle at Neuwied still bearing the marks of the bullets, fired against it by the soldiers of General Hoche. But better still, Arndt would often recite to us some of his own poems, both from the earlier ones, written during the war, and from those of more recent date, all of them glowing with the same patriotic fervour, and kindling a like enthusiasm in the minds of his youthful hearers. There were, however, fortunately other influences at work, to combat what might have been a somewhat one-sided teaching, and prevent us from believing that our old friend possessed a monopoly of patriotism. In the first place, there was Monsieur Monnard, the very interesting French professor at the university, whose refinement of speech and quiet manner were in their way quite as effective and convincing as Arndt’s stormy vehemence, and lent a peculiar charm to his conversation. To his daughter too, a most charming creature, I owed a debt of gratitude for one of the chief joys of my childhood, that delightful book “Augustin,” in which she had told the story, as I afterwards heard, of her own child whom she had lost. When I made her acquaintance, I had read her book a hundred times, and almost knew it by heart! And besides these two, whose love of their country was none the less intense, I felt, for being very calmly expressed, there was another frequent guest in whom that sentiment was evidently the ruling passion and guiding principle in life. The last-mentioned, Demetrius Stourdza, was a slight, spare, very dark young man, who had come from a far-off, and to me then quite unknown country, to pursue his studies at the university, whilst his two younger brothers followed the classes at the gymnasium or public school. When he spoke of his home on the distant Moldau, of his oppressed, unhappy country, it was in terms of the same ardent affection, the same irrepressible emotion, as were Arndt’s in telling the story of Germany’s wrongs; only the ills of which the young student had to tell dated much further back and were so deeply rooted as to appear well nigh incurable. Not only had his country groaned for centuries under foreign tyranny, but she was also torn by internal feuds, split into two provinces, Moldavia and Wallachia, constantly warring one with the other, so that there seemed little prospect of national independence being attained. He spoke with great enthusiasm of his mother-tongue, the beautiful Roumanian language, common heritage of the two provinces, and I remember how, at my mother’s request, he one day spoke a few words of Roumanian, to let us hear the soft melodious sounds. Years after, on my first