A mile or two from Starnberg, on the shore of the beautiful lake, stands a plain country-house, whose chief ornament is a shady and rather wild little park of beeches and cedars. This stretches from the highway that connects Starnberg with the castle and fishermen's huts of Possenhofen, down to the lake--a narrow strip of woodland, separated only by picket fences from the neighboring gardens, so that a person wandering about in it is scarcely aware of its boundaries. The house itself is equally small and simple, and contains, besides one good-sized apartment, with several sleeping-rooms to the right and left, only a turret-room in the upper story, whose great north window shows at the first glance that it is a studio. From it can be seen, over the tops of the cedars, a bit of the lake, and beyond it the white houses and villas of Starnberg, at the foot of the height from whose summit the old ducal castle--now converted into a provincial court-house--rises like a clumsy, blunt-cornered box. Some years before, a landscape painter had built this modest summer nest, and had made his studies of cloud and atmosphere from this turret window. When he died, childless, his widow had made haste to offer the property to the one among her husband's acquaintances who passed for a Cr[oe]sus; thus it was that the villa came into the possession of Edward Rossel, to the great surprise and amusement of all his friends. For our Fat Rossel was known as an incorrigible and fanatical despiser of country life, who was never tired of ridiculing the passion of the Munichers for going into the mountains for refreshment in summer, and who preferred, even in the hottest weather, when none of his friends could hold out in the city any longer, to do without society altogether rather than to give up the comforts of his city home even for a few weeks.