“I take a mournful pleasure in gazing at that tree,” said Flemming, as they rose to depart.  “It stands there so straight and tall, with iron bandsaround its noble trunk and limbs, in silent majesty, or whispering only in its native tongue, and freighting the homeward wind with sighs!  It reminds me of some captive monarch of a savage tribe, brought over the vast ocean for a show, and chained in the public market-place of the city, disdainfully silent, or breathing only in melancholy accents a prayer for his native forest, a longing to be free.”

“Magnificent!” cried the Baron.  “I always experience something of the same feeling when I walk through a conservatory.  The luxuriant plants of the tropics,—­those illustrious exotics, with their gorgeous, flamingo-colored blossoms, and great, flapping leaves, like elephant’s ears,—­have a singular working upon my imagination; and remind me of a menagerie and wild-beasts kept in cages.  But your illustration is finer;—­indeed, a grand figure.  Put it down for an epic poem.”

CHAPTER IV.  A BEER-SCANDAL.

On their way homeward, Flemming and the Baron passed through a narrow lane, in which was a well-known Studenten-Kneipe.  At the door stood a young man, whom the Baron at once recognised as his friend Von Kleist.  He was a student; and universally acknowledged, among his young acquaintance, as a “devilish handsome fellow”; notwithstanding a tremendous scar on his cheek, and a cream-colored mustache, as soft as the silk of Indian corn.  In short he was a renowner, and a duellist.

“What are you doing here, Von Kleist?”

“Ah, my dear Baron!  Is it you?  Come in; come in.  You shall see some sport.  A Fox-Commerce is on foot, and a regular Beer-Scandal.”

“Shall we go in, Flemming?”

“Certainly.  I should like to see how these things are managed in Heidelberg.  You are a Baron, and I am a stranger.  It is of no consequence what you and I do, as the king’s fool Angeli said to the poet Bautru, urging him to put on his hat at the royal dinner-table.”

William Lilly, the Astrologer, says, in his Autobiography, that, when he was committed to the guard-room in White Hall, he thought himself in hell; for “some were sleeping, others swearing, others smoking tobacco; and in the chimney of the room there were two bushels of broken tobacco-pipes, and almost half a load of ashes.”  What he would have thought if he had peeped into this Heidelberg Studenten-Kneipe, I know not.  He certainly would not have thought himself in heaven; unless it were a Scandinavian heaven.  The windows were open; and yet so dense was the atmosphere with the smoke of tobacco, and the fumes of beer, that the tallow candles burnt but dimly.  A crowd of students were sitting at three long tables, in the large hall; a medley of fellows, known at German Universities under the cant names of Old-Ones, Mossy-Heads, Princes of Twilight, and Pomatum-Stallions.  They were smoking, drinking, singing, screaming, and discussing the great Laws of the Broad-Stone and the Gutter.  They had a great deal to say, likewise, about Besens, and Zobels, and Poussades; and, if they had been charged for the noise they made, as travellers used to be, in the old Dutch taverns, they would have had a longer bill to pay for that, than for their beer.