In the summer of 1873 Princess Elizabeth travelled thither with her little daughter. It was the first time since her marriage that she had seen her German home. The happiness of those weeks which she spent with her mother, her brother and sister-in-law, and the dear old friends in town and country, was unclouded. “Monrepos! Monrepos! the laughing, rustling, and sweet-scenting forest welcomes me, and happy faces peer at me through it. Yes, Monrepos was my Paradise!” She seemed to live through her childhood and youth again with their deep joys and sorrows, inward struggles and ultimate peace. Yes, happiness is not to be found in an eternally blue sky, but in infinitesimally small things out of which we shape our life ourselves. THE HOME OF MY FATHERS. “The nightingale’s song of yearning Is blent with the streamlet’s sigh; Above and around the gables The swallows circling fly. And they sing of the passing races That have lived and loved there of yore, How they vanished away in their season, Yet the line is renewed as before. The seed of their spirit’s sowing Still blooms, though the years decay; The earth cannot hide or consume it, Nor the storm cannot sweep it away. The strength of the house is quickened With the glow of ancestral fires; The child from the father inherits, And the ancient spirit inspires. * * * * * The Rhine oft rises in greeting Around my city’s wall, And twineth his arms about her, For he loves her best of all.” With justified maternal pride the mother could gaze on her fair-haired and only little daughter, who became again here the centre of all love and care. On the journey between Mayence and Neuwied the child had repeatedly asked, “Is that mamma’s Rhine?” But the little Princess Marie had, notwithstanding her tender age, an irresistible longing for the country in which she had first seen the light. She was constantly craving to be back again in her distant home, and became nearly ill from home sickness. During the whole journey she kept repeating--“Home, home, let us go home!” When the Roumanian students came to meet them at the station at Vienna, she called out to them in Roumanian, “I am going home to Bucharest with eight horses.” On the return of the Princess to Roumania, they once more took up their abode in the romantic old monastery of Sinaia. Typhus and scarlet fever were raging in Bucharest. The Princess writes full of anxiety--“Bucharest is in such an unhealthy state that I shall return to it with fear and trembling. Typhus fever and angina reign there supreme. Diphtheria has carried off many of the children. They die in a few hours. I often become as unsettled and melancholy as a dark day in the autumn. Then an interesting person or piece of news comes in, and one brightens up like the dew in the sunshine.”