Look closer still in the miscellaneous heap of bric-à-brac which encumbers this same pawnbroker’s back shop, and ten to one you will be able to recognize on some rotting canvas the grim features of old Samuel Bruckenthal himself, or those of his imperial mistress Maria Theresa. Some of these old portraits, which I passed almost daily in my peregrinations about the town, seemed to look at me so plaintively with their canvas eyes, as though imploring me to release them from their ignoble position, that I had to take pity upon them at last and offer them an asylum in my house. Few things ever gave me so vivid an impression of the transitory nature of earthly possessions, and the evanescence of power and grandeur, as these scattered relics of an extinct family meeting the eye at every turn; and as the sea of chance was continually casting up some of these shipwrecked treasures, more than one of them happened to drift my way. Thus one day a poor woman brought to my door a delicate little piece of fancy porcelain, which I was glad to purchase for a small sum. About ten inches high, it represents a miniature citron-tree with blossoms and fruit, growing in a gold-hooped tub of exactly the same shape as the wooden cases in which real orange-trees are often planted. An old lady who recollects the vanished days of the Bruckenthal glory recognized this graceful trifle standing on my drawing-room _console_, and told me that she remembered a whole set of them, pomegranates and citron-trees alternately, with which the table used to be decked out on the occasion of large dinner-parties. What has become of the many companions of my lonely citron-tree, I wonder? and where are now all the faces that used to meet round that festive board? _Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse!_ FOOTNOTES: [71] Reprinted from a publication of the Transylvanian Carpathian Society. [72] It was to me a curious sensation in this out-of-the-way place to come across a copy of my great-grandfather’s work, “Gerard on Taste,” translated into German. I had not been before aware of any such translation existing. CHAPTER XLIV. STILL-LIFE AT HERMANSTADT—A TRANSYLVANIAN CRANFORD. Life at Hermanstadt always gave me the impression of living inside one of those exquisitely minute Dutch paintings of still-life, in which the anatomy of a lobster or the veins on a vine-leaf are rendered with microscopic fidelity, and where such insignificant objects as half-lemons or mouldy cheese-rinds are exalted to the rank of centre-pieces.