It will be my last song; the stars will gaze on me as in the nights of my youth, the loving moonlight will once more kiss my cheeks, the spirit chorus of nightingales long dead will sound from afar, my sleep-drunken eyes will close, my soul will echo with the notes of my harp; I shall smell the flowers of Brenta. A tree will shadow my grave. I would gladly have it a palm, but that tree will not grow in the North. It will be a linden, and on summer evenings lovers will sit there and caress; the green-finch, who rocks himself on the branches, will be listening silently, and my linden will rustle tenderly over the heads of the happy ones, who will be so happy that they will have no time to read what is written on the white tombstone. But when later the lover has lost his love, then he will come again to the well-known linden, and sigh, and weep, and gaze long and oft upon the stone, and read the inscription--"He loved the flowers of Brenta." CHAPTER V. Madame! I have deceived you. I am not the Count of the Ganges. Never in my life have I seen the holy stream, nor the lotus flowers which are mirrored in its sacred waves. Never did I lie dreaming under Indian palms, nor in prayer before the Diamond Deity Juggernaut, who with his diamonds might have easily aided me out of my difficulties. I have no more been in Calcutta than the turkey, of which I ate yesterday at dinner, had ever been in the realms of the Grand Turk. Yet my ancestors came from Hindostan, and therefore I feel so much at my ease in the great forest of song of Valmiki. The heroic sorrows of the divine Ramo move my heart like familiar griefs; from the flower lays of Kalidasa the sweetest memories bloom; and when a few years ago a gentle lady in Berlin showed me the beautiful pictures which her father, who had been Governor in India, had brought from thence, the delicately-painted, holy, calm faces seemed as familiar to me as though I were gazing at my own family gallery. Franz Bopp--Madame, you have of course read his _Nalus_ and his System of Sanscrit Conjugations--gave me much information relative to my ancestry, and I now know with certainty that I am descended from Brahma's head, and not from his corns. I have also good reason to believe that the entire _Mahabarata_, with its two hundred thousand verses, is merely an allegorical love-letter which my first fore-father wrote to my first fore-mother. Oh! they loved dearly, their souls kissed, they kissed with their eyes, they were both but one single kiss. An enchanted nightingale sits on a red coral bough in the silent sea, and sings a song of the love of my ancestors; the pearls gaze eagerly from their shells, the wonderful water-flowers tremble with sorrow, the cunning sea-snails, bearing on their backs many-coloured porcelain towers, come creeping onwards, the ocean-roses blush with shame, the yellow, sharp-pointed starfish, and the thousand-hued glassy jelly-fish quiver and stretch, and all swarm and listen.