I recall among other things a tragi-comedy entitled “Cleopatra,” which was performed on the domestic stage. My Own had written the text, in gory doggerel, and composed the music for it as well. The rôle of the Egyptian queen was intrusted to my hands. The eldest son of the house, at that time already a lieutenant of dragoons, appeared as a helmeted officer of the Roman Guards; a neighboring proprietor played Antony; the young girls of the family had to enact the part of slaves, and the author of the masterpiece mimicked an old wandering prophet who knew all things in advance, from the Queen’s death of snake-bite up to the latest events in the Vienna city council. The governess at Stockern, a wonderfully pretty young English lady, had to play the part of Cleopatra’s maid, whose most important function it was to groom her mistress’s pet snake. Miss Pratt’s English accent had a monstrously comical effect. As she knew no German, her part had been hammered into her only with the greatest difficulty. In a soliloquy she had to apostrophize the snake intrusted to her care with the words _o du elendes Mistvieh_—“O you wretched dung-brute” (from that specimen of the text may be got some idea of the loftiness of the poem), but she declaimed it _o du ellen Mittwoch_! From that day, when people at Stockern wanted to be rude they called each other _Mittwoch_, “Wednesday.” To us two the greatest festival of the year was always the twelfth of June, the anniversary of our marriage. But we never cared to celebrate it with more company than ourselves, and so it came to pass that if we were at Harmannsdorf at that date we left for parts unknown early in the morning and were gone at least twenty-four hours. Having run away on our real wedding day, we did so on the anniversaries too. Of all things, no congratulations and toasts on that day; we wanted to be alone—in devotion. We would drive down to the railway, take tickets to any station; arriving there, we would hunt up the local hotel to order a dinner, and then go out into the fields and woods. June, you know, is the happy month when everything is in full bloom, when roses grow rank and the cuckoo calls, when all nature is a wedding celebration. We would wander about for a few hours and then come to our dinner with a glorious appetite; we would have it served under an arbor in the hotel garden. And then out to the woods again. There we would seek out a shady or perchance a sunny place—we were not afraid of the sun, but had a lizard-like predilection for its caressing glow—and there other hours of hallowed dialogue would pass: hours which were prolonged till the setting of the sun, till the rising of the moon, till the blowing of the evening breezes. Then back to the inn, where supper was awaiting us in a neat room. And our material for conversation was still not exhausted—from year to year it grew richer; for what we said to each other on those days was the manifold variation of the now cheerful, now