Judging by the whole tenor of his conduct, I decided, that, striving as he did, at aims so serious, he found no time for trifling flirtations, and never had been touched by a deeper feeling. His mother had died very soon after the birth of her first-born son, but he would occasionally receive letters, addressed in a feminine hand, and he told me they came from an old nurse of his, who had been as a second mother to him. She was evidently very dear to him; but even of her he spoke but little; eager discussions upon his own studies, or on mine, were ever burning on his lips. He was several years in advance of me, and when we parted in the autumn, he went to pass his diplomatic examination at Berlin. We bid each other a very affectionate farewell, without much hope of continuous intercourse;--we knew that what we had hitherto exchanged, no correspondence could have replaced. But we were young, and we parted in the confident hope that life and its chances must, in some way or other, bring us together again. For many a long year, I heard nothing of him but his name; the last I learned was from a newspaper, which stated that Count Ernest ---- had been appointed secretary of Legation at Stockholm. Again a long time elapsed, without the smallest tidings of him, and I confess that his image had considerably faded in my memory, when it chanced, that, on a pedestrian tour, I suddenly lit upon his name, printed upon a road-post that pointed to a deep lane, all overgrown with brushwood, cutting at right angles the road which I had taken. I stopped, and, as if by a magician's wand, the country round me seemed metamorphosed. Again the Rhine was rolling at my feet, and again I saw his straight lithe figure, as he walked along, holding his hat in his hand, and letting the fresh breeze from the current play among his luxuriant hair of reddish gold; and those fine eyes of his, so full of thought, gazing over the river towards the mountains, until my voice would rouse him from his musings. This visionary play of memory lasted but a moment, and then an incontrollable desire came over me to look upon that face once more, and abundantly to make up for what I had lost so long. It was early in the afternoon; I hoped that I should not mistake the road, and never doubted but that at this autumn season, I should find my friend at home; he was an eager sportsman, and had spoken far oftener of the trees, than of the persons he had known from childhood.