Why have I not made these sage reflections, this wise resolve, sooner? Can such a simple result spring only from the long and intricate process of experience? Alas! it is not till Time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life, to light the fires of passion with, from day to day, that Man begins to see, that the leaves which remain are few in number, and to remember, faintly at first, and then more clearly, that, upon the earlier pages of that book, was written a story of happy innocence, which he would fain read over again. Then come listless irresolution, and the inevitable inaction of despair; or else the firm resolve to record upon the leaves that still remain, a more noble history, than the child's story, with which the book began." CHAPTER IX. THE LAST PANG. "Farewell to thee, Saint Gilgen!" said Flemming, as he turned on the brow of the hill, to take his last look at the lake and the village below, and felt that this was one of the few spots on the wide earth to which he could say farewell with regret. "Thy majestic hills have impressed themselves upon my soul, as a seal upon wax. The quiet beauty of thy lake shall be to me forever an image of peace and purity and stillness, and that inscription in thy little churchyard, a sentence of wisdom for my after life." Before the setting of the same sun, which then shone on that fair landscape, he was far on his way towards Munich. He had left far behind him the mountains of the Tyrol; and beheld themfor the last time in the soft evening twilight, their bases green with forest trees, and here and there, a sharp rocky spire, and a rounded summit capped with snow. There they lay, their backs, like the backs of camels; a mighty caravan, reposing at evening in its march across the desert. From Munich he passed through Augsburg and Ulm, on his way to Stuttgard. At the entrances of towns and villages, he saw large crucifixes; and on the fronts of many houses, coarse paintings and images of saints. In Gunzburg three priests in black were slowly passing down the street, and women fell on their knees to receive their blessing. There were many beggars, too, in the streets; and an old man who was making hay in a field by the road-side, when he saw the carriage approaching, threw down his rake, and came tumbling over the ditch, with his hat held out in both hands, uttering the most dismal wail. The next day, the bright yellow jackets of the postilions, and the two great tassels of their bugle-horns, dangling down their backs, like two cauliflowers, told him he was in Würtemberg; and, late in the evening, he stopped at a hotel in Stuttgard; and from his chamber-window, saw, in the bright moonlight, the old Gothic cathedral, with its narrow, lancet windows and jutting buttresses, right in front of him. Ere long he had forgotten all his cares and sorrows in sleep, and with them his hopes, and wishes, and good resolves.