A few days later, two strangers engaged in eager conversation sat together in the garden-square, between the four Kur-houses of Bad Neukuhren. In the one, notwithstanding that he wore fashionable summer garments, we again recognise the sportsman of the forest, whose sun-burnt features contrasted so strongly with the light straw hat and light-coloured clothes; the other gazed morosely from beneath an untidy felt hat, his sharp furrowed face, which was, however, cast in a noble and somewhat elevated mould, suited the muscular figure.
He might have been taken for a sailor, owing to the power and determination that lay in his whole appearance, had not a refined spiritual expression in his eyes shown that he was wont to occupy himself with intellectual subjects.
"I rejoice, dear Doctor, to have become better acquainted with you here," said the sportsman, "the companions of my own position are somewhat too coolly indifferent to everything that interests me. At the Chief Forester's, things are conducted too patriarchally, and, therefore, I fled to the sea to distract my mind. I will only return to my castle when the rebuilding of the one wing is completed. I gave the architect the exact plan; but always to be present oneself, and to watch its being carried out, is not in accordance with my taste. Everything unfinished is odious to me; those lime pits, those carts of stone, those scaffoldings, make an uncomfortable impression upon me. Therefore, I accepted the Chief Forester's invitation at first, he being an old friend of my father."
"How long have you been back in Europe, Herr Von Blanden?" asked the Doctor.
"I have been in Europe for two years; but during that time I have exhausted the romance of the south; spent two summers on the Italian lakes, whose charms are indescribable! I have seen the Highland lakes in the giant mountains of Thibet and the sun of Palestine; yet the peculiarity of a Lago Maggiore; that balminess that hovers over the water, the islands, the shores, cannot be found elsewhere! My father's death, two month's ago, recalled me to East Prussia; it marked a turning point in my life."
"You became rich," said the Doctor.
"I have never needed to trouble myself about money, and I consider that a great advantage. Those are unhappy mortals who, amongst all the other ills of life, must also take that vile metal into consideration in everything that they do or wish! Is there a more inconsolable slavery than that of dependance upon money? Therein consists the happiness of riches, that they do not know these limits."
"The German student does not know them either," interposed the Doctor, "or, rather, will not know them. Youth is free! But the unpaid accounts follow us for many long years, and a frowning father reminds us that this youthful freedom belongs to the kingdom of dreams."
"Thus, it was not that," continued Blanden, "which made such a metamorphosis in my life; yet I returned with the firm determination to put an end, at last, to the epoch of adventures by land and sea; not to seek an object in life in the refined, inordinate longing after enjoyment of travelling; not in the varying circumstances which it offers to the mind and heart, but rather in active, earnest work, and, above all, by these means, to extinguish the unpleasant recollections that cling to my past."
"Youthful recollections!" said the Doctor, as he removed his felt hat, and took advantage of its pliability to press it into diverse forms, "who has not similar ones to note down in his diaries? And, after all, one may ask if these wanderings astray do not give more worth to life, than our exertions drawn by rule and measure?"