Johanna was the cousin of the three sisters, and I was glad to be with her. She knew the most beautiful old legends, and when she pointed with her white hand through the window out to the mountains where all had happened which she narrated, I became enchanted; the old knights rose visibly from the ruined castles, and hewed away at each other’s iron clothes, the Loreley sat again on the mountain summit, singing adown her sweet, seductive song, and the Rhine rippled so reasonably soothing--and yet so mockingly horrible--and the fair Johanna looked at me so strangely, with such enigmatic tenderness, that she seemed herself one with the legend that she told. She was a slender, pale girl, sickly and musing; her eyes were clear as truth itself; her lips piously arched; in her face lay a great story. Was it a love legend? I know not, and I never had the courage to ask. When I looked at her long I grew calm and cheerful; it seemed to me as though it was Sunday in my heart, and the angels held service there. In such happy hours I told her tales of my childhood, and she listened earnestly, and strangely, when I could not think of the names, she remembered them. When I then asked her with wonder how she knew the names, she would answer with a smile that she had learned it of the birds that had built a nest on the sill of her window; and she tried to make me believe that these were the same birds which I once bought with my pocket-money from a hard-hearted peasant-boy, and then let fly away. But I believed that she knew everything, because she was so pale, and really soon died. She knew, too, when she would die, and wished that I would leave Adernach the day before. When I bade her farewell she gave me both her hands; they were white, sweet hands, and pure as the frost; and she said, “You are very good, and when you are not, think of the little dead Veronica.” Did the chattering birds also tell her this name? Often in hours of remembrance I had wearied my brain in trying to think of that dear name, but could not. And now that I have it again, my earliest infancy shall bloom into memory again, and I am again a child, and play with other children in the Castle Court at Düsseldorf, on the Rhine.