bridal procession passed through.  The bride was clothed in the garb of the Middle Ages; and held a book in her hand, with velvet covers, and golden clasps.  It was Mary Ashburton.  She looked at him as she passed.  Her face was pale; and there were tears in her sweet eyes.  Then the gates closed again; and one of the oaken poppy-heads over a carved stall, in the shape of an owl, flapped its broad wings, and hooted, “Towhit! to-whoo!” Then the whole scene changed; and he thought himself a monk’s-head on a gutterspout; and it rained dismally; and Berkley was standing under with an umbrella, laughing!

In other words, Flemming was in a ragingfever, and delirious.  He remained in this state for a week.  The first thing he was conscious of was hearing the doctor say to Berkley;

“The crisis is passed.  I now consider him out of danger.”

He then fell into a sweet sleep; the wild fever had swept away like an angry, red cloud, and the refreshing summer rain began to fall like dew upon the parched earth.  Still another week; and Flemming was, “sitting clothed, and in his right mind.”  Berkley had been reading to him; and still held the book in his hand, with his fore-finger between the leaves.  It was a volume of Hoffmann’s writings.

“How very strange it is,” said he, “that you can hardly open the biography of any German author, but you will find it begin with an account of his grandfather.  It will tell you how the venerable old man walked up and down the garden among the gay flowers, wrapped in his morning gown, which is likewise covered with flowers, and perhaps wearing on his head a little velvet cap.  Oryou will find him sitting by the chimney-corner in the great chair, smoking his ancestral pipe, with shaggy eyebrows and eyes like birdsnests under the eaves of a house, and a mouth like a Nuremberg nutcracker’s.  The future poet climbs upon the old man’s knees.  His genius is not recognised yet.  He is thought for the most part a dull boy.  His father is an austere man, or perhaps dead.  But the mother is still there, a sickly, saint-like woman, with knitting-work, and an elder sister, who has already been in love, and wears rings on her fingers;—­

’Death’s heads, and such mementos,

Her grandmother and worm-eaten aunts left to her,

To tell her what her beauty must arrive at.’”

“But this is not the case with the life of Hoffmann, if I recollect right.”

“No, not precisely.  Instead of the grandfather we have the grandmother, a stately dame, who has long since shaken hands with the vanities of life.  The mother, separated from her husband, is sick in mind and body, and flits to and fro, like a shadow.  Then there is an affectionate maiden aunt; and an uncle, a retired judge, the terror of little boys,—­the Giant Despair of this Doubting Castle in Koenigsberg; and occasionally the benign countenance of a venerable grand-uncle, whom Lamotte Fouque called a hero of the