How he longed for something, though it were only a fallen, faded rose of--silk from Pestitz; and yet he could not for shame ask the Vienna teacher for anything except at the very last, after long thinking, though with a betraying glow, for one--lesson-mark; "for he had never yet seen one," he said. Falterle had one at this moment in his pocket,--the number 15, Liana's former age, was written upon it;--she might have written the number possibly;--still it was something. Ah, could he not more willingly have beset the Director for some romances out of the portable-library of the Minister's lady, in which the daughter must certainly have read, yes, and might well even have forgotten some notes of her reading? He actually did it; but Wehrfritz condemned and cursed in the beginning all romances as poisoned letters; then he forgot over five times to ask for any;--and finally he brought with him a novel of Madam Genlis, together with a Gotha pocket-almanac. These books of the blest--in comparison with which my own works and the Alexandrine Library and the blue library are only miserable _remittenda_--had all the stamps of women's books; for they all contained some ornament or other of female heads, namely, a thimbleful of hair-powder as they do, fag-ends of silk-ribbon as they do, for demarcation-lines and memoranda of readings,--and just the same fragrance (which Semler also praises in the books of alchemy), and which they seemed to have borrowed from the blossoms of Paradise. Ah, happy reader of the fairest book (I mean the Count), canst thou ask more? By all means; and he found more, too, namely, in the latter end of the Gotha pocket-almanac, on the two blank parchment-leaves, the words, "Concert for the Poor, the 21st February," and "Play for the Poor, the 1st Nov." I have often, in my chase after mysteries, beaten out, on these leaves, the weightiest ones from the bush. "Yes, that is my pupil's hand," said Falterle; "she and her mother seldom let such an opportunity slip, because the Minister does not allow them otherwise to give much to the poor." Do not detain me here about the beauty of her handwriting,--besides one writes better on parchment and slate than on paper, and a literary lady, exactly unlike a literary man in this, has more calligraphy than illiterate ones,--but let me hasten on to the working of these _incunabula_ of Liana, whose Dominical characters diffuse over a loving man nothing but bright, inner Sundays of the soul, and whose leaves resemble in sanctity the Epistles which, in the Middle Ages, fell from heaven upon the earth. Now, for the first time, was it to him as if the flying angel, whose shadow hitherto had only glided over the earth, folded up his pinions, and held his downward course in the track of the shadow, not far from the spot where Albano stands. He learned the Gotha pocket-almanac by heart.