The clear atmosphere, the splendid sunsets, the dry leaves that here and there fluttered down from the trees, announced the approach of another autumn. It was the season that I had spent the year before at Castle Zehrendorf; these were the same signs that I had then so closely observed, and they awakened in my soul a crowd of memories. I had believed that these memories were deeply buried, and I now found that only a thin covering had been spread over them, which every light sighing of the melancholy autumn breeze sufficed to lift. Indeed it often seemed to me that the wounds which had been inflicted on me a year before were about to open once more. I again lived over all that time, but it was as when a waking man, in full consciousness, calls back a vivid dream. What in a dream, with the incomplete activity of our intellectual faculties, seemed to us natural and reasonable, appears to us, when awake, as a strange phantasm; and what then tormented us as incomprehensible, we can now clearly understand, because we can supply the vacant steps which our dreaming fancy has leaped lightly over. I had only to compare my position at that time with the present, to see how wild a caricature my fancy had drawn. Then I imagined myself free, and was really involved in a net of the most unhappy, the most repulsive circumstances, as a fly in the web of a spider; now I slept every night behind bars of iron, and felt as calm and safe as when one steps from a swaying boat upon the steady land. Then I believed that I had found my proper career, and now I saw that that life was only a continuation, and to a certain extent the consequence of a youth spent without plan or aim. And in what light now did the persons in whose destinies I had taken such a passionate interest, now appear to me, when I compared them with those whom I had learned to love so cordially--when I compared, for instance, the Wild Zehren with his wise and gentle brother? And, as I had begun to draw comparisons, that dejected, sleepy giant, Hans von Trantow--where now was the good Hans, if he was not dead? and there were those who insisted that he was safe enough, and they knew very well where he was--had to take his place by the side of the little, intelligent Doctor Snellius, always full of life and motion; and even poor old Christian was compared with the vigorous old Sergeant Süssmilch. But most vividly was the comparison forced upon me between the beautiful, romantic Constance, and the pure, refined Paula.