Inside the Park, which was not at that time intersected with regular walks, one saw meadows, uncultivated spots, and beech-wood benches, on which Young Germany not long ago had carved hearts pierced by daggers: under these stabbed hearts one read the name of "Sand[128]." Flights of crows, taking up their dwelling in the trees at the approach of spring, were beginning to chatter. Living nature was reviving before vegetable nature, and quite black frogs were being gobbled up by ducks in the ponds which here and there had thawed: those were the nightingales which "opened the spring-time in the woods" of Berlin. However, the Park was not without pretty animals: squirrels scrambled along the branches or darted along the ground, sporting their tails as a flag. When I came near the merry-making, the actors climbed the trunks of the oaks, stopped in a fork, and snarled at me as I passed below. Few strollers frequented the forest, the uneven soil of which was lined and cut by canals. Sometimes I would meet a gouty old officer who, quite warm and lively, would say to me, speaking of the pale ray of the sun under which I was shivering with cold: "That's scorching!" From time to time, I came across the Duke of Cumberland, on horseback and almost blind, pulling up in front of an alder-tree, against which he had ridden and knocked his nose. Some six-horsed carriages would pass: in them were the Austrian Ambassadress or the Princess von Radziwill and her daughter, fifteen years of age, charming as one of those clouds with maidens' faces that surround Ossian's moon. The Duchess of Cumberland nearly always took the same walk as myself: at one time, she was returning from a cottage where she had been relieving a poor woman of Spandau; at another, she stopped and graciously told me that she had wanted to meet me: an amiable daughter of the thrones alighting from her car, like the Goddess of Night, to roam in the forest! I also saw her in her own house: she would repeat that she wished to entrust me with her son, that little "George[129]," since grown into the Prince whom his cousin Victoria[130] would, they say, have liked to place by her side on the throne of England. [Sidenote: The Duchess of Cumberland.] The Princess Frederica has since dragged out her days on the banks of the Thames, in those gardens at Kew which formerly saw me wander between my two acolytes, illusion and poverty. After my departure from Berlin, she honoured me with a correspondence; in it she describes, from hour to hour, the life of an inhabitant of those heaths where Voltaire passed, where Frederic died, where that Mirabeau hid himself who was to commence the Revolution of which I was the victim. One's attention is captivated on seeing the links by which so many men are connected who have never seen each other. Here are some extracts from the correspondence opened with me by H.R.H. the Duchess of Cumberland: "19 _April_[131], _Thursday._