Emanuel Philipp, Count Waldstein and Wartemberg von Dux, and his wife, a daughter of Emanuel Prince Lichtenstein, were parents of eleven children. The fourth son was Ferdinand Ernst Gabriel, born March 24, 1762. Uniting in his veins the blood of many of the houses of the Austrian Empire, there was no career, no line of preferment open to younger sons of titled families, which was not open to him, or to which he might not aspire. It was determined that he should seek activity in the Teutonic Order, of which Max Franz was Grand Master. According to the rules and regulations of the order, the young nobleman came to Bonn to pass his examinations and spend his year of novitiate. Could the time of his arrival there be determined with certainty, the date would have a most important bearing either to confirm or disprove the chronological argument of some of our earlier pages; but one may well despair of finding so unimportant an event as the journey of a young man of 25 from Vienna to the Rhine anywhere upon record. One thing bearing directly upon this point may be read in the “Wiener Zeitung” of July 2, 1788. A correspondent in Bonn says that on “the day before yesterday,” i.e., June 17, 1788, “our gracious sovereign, as Hoch- und Deutschmeister, gave the accolade with the customary ceremonies to the Count von Waldstein, who had been accepted in the Teutonic Order.” Allowing for the regular year of novitiate, the Count was certainly in Bonn before the 17th of June, 1787. The misfortune of two unlucky Bohemian peasants, strange as it may seem, gives us, after the lapse of a century, a satisfactory solution of the difficulty. Some one reports in the “Wiener Zeitung” of May, 19, 1787, that on the 4th of that month two peasant houses were destroyed by fire in the village of Likwitz belonging to Osegg, and adds: “Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, moved by a noble spirit of humanity, hurried from Dux, took charge of affairs and was to be found wherever the danger was greatest.” It was between May 4 and June 17, 1787, that Waldstein parted from his widowed mother and journeyed to the place of his novitiate. His name may easily have become known to Wegeler before the latter’s departure from Bonn for Vienna.[41] Here follows what the good doctor says of the Count--to what degree correct or mistaken, the reader can determine for himself: