The family of the fallen youth were immediately written to, to tell them, that, on account of some degree of indisposition, he would not be able immediately to follow them, as had been agreed, and a friend of the house undertook the sorrowful task of opening to them the dreadful intelligence. But the most terrible part was yet to come. Von Avensleben was highly beloved amongst the students, and it was resolved to attend his funeral with a torch-train; and that the wretched prisoner, who, during all this time had sate brooding in a stupor of grief without listening to any one, might not perceive it, they determined that the funeral should take place a day earlier than usual. I was with the unhappy man on this eventful evening, endeavouring to comfort him, and to withdraw his thoughts from the dark pictures of his imagination. The shutters of the little room were closed, but a tone of the dismal mourning music struck his ear as the funeral train passed by the end of the street, along the Hauptstrasse, or High Street, of the city. "My friend! they bear him to the grave!" cried he with a terrible voice, and rushed to the window. I endeavoured to hold him back, but he tore himself loose from my grasp with giant strength, and bursting open the shutters struck his head against the iron grating. There flared the sullen glow of the torches, and the tone of the trumpets quivered through my vitals. With ghostlike, terrible, and distorted countenance, he gazed after the melancholy train;--"I--I have murdered him! the good, the true friend! There! I see him with the bleeding wound, crying, 'Wo!' over me! Oh God! Oh God! thou has cast me off! Maria! Maria! what have I done to thee! Seize me, ye spirits of hell! Tear me away from the pure angel-form!" So he raved on, till, exhausted, he fell back into the chamber. He passed the night in the most horrible delirium; and for many days it was not dared to leave him a moment alone, lest he should effect his desperate endeavours at self-destruction. But if the train left horrors behind it, it met yet still greater as it approached the end of the city. The letter had reached the family of Von Avensleben, but the friend had missed the sisters in the darkness of the night, as they hastened back to town to attend their sick brother. "Whom do they bury there?" asked the trembling Maria, as their carriage, passing in at the Mannheim gate, was detained by the mourning procession. "The student who was shot in the duel," answered an old man, who did not know the young lady--"the Herr Von Avensleben."