It was the Princess; her carriages stood just aside; Bouverot and Fraischdöfer were with her. How like balsam it steals through the heart, in a strange land, and though it were the loveliest, to meet again a brother or a sister inhabitant of a rougher land, as if one were meeting in the second world a kindred son of earth! The Adige, too, that had previously in the wild mountains accompanied him under the name of the Etsch, followed him with its fairer designation into the plain. The Princess seemed to him, he knew not why, to have become milder, more maidenly in form and look, and he reproached himself with his earlier error. But he only committed a later one. Beyond Vienna her strongly drawn physiognomy was surpassed by sharper southern ones, and the striking[72] colors in which she loved to array herself were outshone by the Italian. A strange soil is a masquerade ball-room or a watering-place hall, where only human relations, and no political ones, prevail, and in a strange land men are least strangers. All touched each other in friendliness, as strange hands feel after and grasp each other during the ascent of mountains. With what veneration did Albano look upon the Princess! For he thought, "She would fain have taken the departed one with her into the healing Eden. O, the saint would indeed be happy this morning, and her blue eye would weep for bliss." Then his did so, but not for bliss; and thus are the fire-works of life, like others, built always by and upon water. Then was the oath solemnly sworn within him before the beautiful face of the dead Liana: "I will be truly the friend of this her friend!" Man plays a new part in the drama of life most warmly and best; over our introductory sermons the Holy Spirit floats, brooding with the wings of a dove; only by and by do the eggs lie cold. Albano, never yet initiated into any friendship but a man's, worshipped that of woman as a rising star, and for this, as for the former, he found far more capacities of sacrifice treasured up in his warm soul than for love. Man is in friendship what woman is in love, and the reverse; namely, more covetous of the object than of the feeling for it. With new swelling sails and flying streamers, in gayly decorated singing-vessels, with propitious side winds, did the gay passage fly through cities and pastures. Nothing hangs out over the _corso_ of a long journey a finer festoon of fruits and flowers, for a carriage which goes before, than a couple of carriages coming after. What fellowship of joy and danger in night quarters! What bespeaking of lines of march! What joy over the adventures past and to come, namely, over the reports of the same! And how each loves the others!