I could wish that many another young girl might go through the experience that then was mine, that she might enjoy and profit by days like our winter-days in Monrepos, provided, of course, that she had such a companion as Fräulein Lavater to share in them. And better still were the long winter evenings, when we sat round the lamp, the immense deep stillness of the mighty woods reigning outside and a like feeling of calm, of aloofness from the world dwelling within our souls. Of inestimable value was that time for me, after all the bustle and fatigue of the long journeys, of the rapid succession of events, of all the changing, shifting phantasmagoria of the busy, restless world, stamped in almost bewildering variety on my brain. The impressions had been so vivid, so multitudinous, they bade fair to grow confused or distorted, crowding on and threatening to efface each other. But now, in this quiet uneventful existence, I could look through the rich collection I had brought home with me, could examine each treasure undisturbed, and range them all in order, could bring myself into harmony with all I had so recently acquired. How quickly those evenings passed! Our fingers were busy all the time; my mother spinning, and I already making all sorts of new inventions in tatting,--that pretty work of which I have always been so fond, and which I have gone on elaborating of late years into something resembling old-fashioned ecclesiastical embroideries. We talked at intervals, or else read aloud by turns,--from some author whose high and noble thoughts we might meditate on for long after. It was the sensation of being enfolded and shut off from the rest of the world by the woods around us, that lent those evenings their peculiar charm. Often during the day I had wandered for hours through my beloved woods, with the sole companionship of the faithful St. Bernard dogs, my trusty guardians. We did not keep to the beaten path, but plunged into the deepest thickets, threading our way through the most tangled growth of brushwood. And on my return, my first care was to note down the songs which the trees had whispered in my ear as I passed beneath them. I was the wild rose, the wood rose, for all my friends. They had christened me thus, because of the roses on my cheeks, which I never lost, although so much of my youth had been spent in the atmosphere of the sick-room. I might indeed pass as a living contradiction to every sort of theory of infection, my magnificent health would have given the lie to all stories of germs and microbes,--I was really never ill in my life, and never had occasion to see a doctor, until the attack of typhoid fever I had while in St. Petersburg. That was perhaps in a great measure the result of the long anxiety, the sadness of years, but it did not come on till afterwards, not in the least as an immediate consequence of the unhealthy atmosphere in which I had grown up.