bound with cypress and rosemary, indicating clearly enough the sadness of her mood. She did the same for several days, which brought her council of women into much perplexity, and many deep debates about the cause of their fair Melechsala's grief; but withal, as in female consultations too often happens, they arrived at no conclusion, as in calling for the vote there was such a dissonance of opinions, that no harmonious note could be discovered in them. The truth was, Count Ernst's too zealous efforts to anticipate every nod of the Princess, and realise whatever she expressed the faintest hint of, had so acted on a frame unused to labour, that his health suffered under it, and he was seized with a fever. Yet the Jewish pupil of Galen, or rather the Count's fine constitution, mastered the disease, and in a few days he was able to resume his tasks. The instant the Princess noticed him, the clouds fled away from her brow; and her female senate, to whom her melancholy humour had remained an inexplicable riddle, now unanimously voted that some flower-plant, of whose progress she had been in doubt, had now taken root and begun to thrive,--a conclusion not inaccurate, if taken allegorically. [21] Head-gardener. Princess Melechsala was still as innocent in heart as she had come from the hands of Nature. She had never got the smallest warning or foreboding of the rogueries, which Amor is wont to play on inexperienced beauties. Hitherto, on the whole, there has been a want of _Hints for Princesses and Maidens_ in regard to love; though a satisfactory theory of that kind might do infinitely greater service to the world than any _Hints for the Instructors of Princes_;[22] a class of persons who regard no hint, however broad, nay sometimes take it ill; whereas maidens never fail to notice every hint, and pay heed to it, their perception being finer, and a secret hint precisely their affair. The Princess was still in the first novitiate of love, and had not the slightest knowledge of its mysteries. She therefore yielded wholly to her feelings, without scrupling in the least, or ever calling a Divan of the three confidantes of her heart, Reason, Prudence and Reflection, to deliberate on the business. Had she done so, doubtless the concern she felt in the circumstances of the Bostangi would have indicated to her that the germ of an unknown passion was already vegetating strongly in her heart, and Reason and Reflection would have whispered to her that this passion was _love_. Whether in the Count's heart there was any similar process going on in secret, we have no diplomatic evidence before us: his over-anxious zeal to execute the commands of his mistress might excite some such conjecture; and if so, a bunch of Lovage with a withered stalk of Honesty, tied up together, might have befitted him as an allegorical nosegay. Perhaps, however, it was nothing but an innocent chivalrous feeling which occasioned this distinguished