CHAPTER XXV.

The summers of my convalescence.

While I spent the winters in my mother’s house in industrious work and pleasant social life, the summers took me out of the city into the open air.  I always went first with my faithful nurse and companion to Wildbad; the remainder of the warm season I spent on the Elbe, sometimes with my mother, sometimes with my aunt.

I used the Wildbad springs in all seventeen times.  For two summers, aided by a servant, I descended from a wheel-chair into the warm water; in the third I could dispense with assistance; and from the fourth for several lustra I moved unchecked with a steady step.  After a long interval, owing to a severe relapse of the apparently conquered disease, I returned to them.

The Wurtemberg Wildbad is one of the oldest cures in Germany.  The legend of the Count Mirtemberg, who discovered its healing powers by seeing a wild boar go down to the warm spring to wash its wound, has been rendered familiar by Uhland to every German.  Ulrich von Hutten also used it.  It rises in a Black Forest valley inclosed by stately mountains, a little stream, the Enz, crystal clear, and abounding in trout.

The small town on both banks of the river expands, ere the Enz loses itself in the leafage, into the Kurplatz, where one stately building of lightred sandstone adjoins another.  The little white church stands at the left.  But the foil, the background for everything, is the beautiful foliage, which is as beneficial to the eyes as are the springs to the suffering body.  This fountain of health has special qualities.  The Swabian says, “just right, like Wildbad.”  It gushes just the right degree of heat for the bath from the gravelly sand.  After bathing early in the morning I rested an hour, and when I rose obeyed any other directions of the physician in charge of the watering-place.

The remainder of the day, if the weather was pleasant, I spent out of doors, usually in the grounds under the leafy trees and groups of shrubs on the shore of the Enz.  On the bank of the clear little stream stood a wooden arbour, where the murmur of the waves rippling over the mossy granite blocks invited dreams and meditation.  During my whole sojourn in Wildbad I always passed several hours a day here.  During my period of instruction I was busied with grammatical studies in ancient Egyptian text or archaeological works.  In after years, instead of Minerva, I summoned the muse and committed to paper the thoughts and images which had been created in my mind at home.  I wrote here the greater portion of An Egyptian Princess, and afterwards many a chapter of Uarda, Homo Sum, and other novels.

I was rarely interrupted, for the report had spread that I wished to be alone while at work; yet even the first year I did not lack acquaintances.