"Yes, long since," murmured the young man, bending down and looking with deep emotion at the fanciful flower. He saw in his memory a little cozy garden near the town wall, where he played about, gathering small stones, flowers, and other rarities, and carried them to a beautiful but pale young woman, who always stroked his head when he came to throw his burden into her lap, and with a mother's patience never tired to answer his thousand questions. Then he had brought her such a flower, too, and the beautiful lady had said: "That is larkspur!" And then she had gazed so long at the flower that the tears had gathered in her eyes, and she had taken him passionately and pressed him to her bosom, and there he must have fallen asleep, tired from playing so long, for he remembered nothing more. The beautiful young lady he knew was his mother; she had died before he was five years old. Who has not experienced it himself, that amid the stir and turmoil of life, where one image continually crowds out another, and we are forever tyrannically held fast by the moment, everything gradually fades away, even what we held dearest upon earth, even the parents to whom we owe our life! Thus Oswald also had almost forgotten that he had ever had a mother; now the simple little flower awakened in him forcibly the memory of the long lost mother. The first weeks which he spent in the solitude of country life recalled to him the first years of his life, for he had never since communed so closely, so intimately, with nature, or beheld her charming face so near by. He remembered now also his father, who had died two years ago in the same isolation in which he had lived, and felt for him now that grateful affection, which, unfortunately, never blooms out fully till those are long gone whom its fragrance would have rejoiced most. He remembered his father, a strange pygmy in form, whom the son at eighteen years already overtopped by more than two feet; an eccentric misanthrope, who was known all over town as the "Old Candidate," and whose wornout black dress coat, in which he appeared winter and summer alike, was familiar to every child in the street. He remembered how the strange, enigmatical man jealously locked up the rich wealth of his learning and his goodness from all the world except from his only son, whom he loved with ineffable affection, whom he nursed and tended with all a mother's tenderness, and for whom even he, the miser, thought nothing too dear.