THE TWO CAPTAINS.
Page: 4

this city, and will beg you after midnight also to render me a small
service. My story is short, and will not detain us longer than we
must wait before the twilight has become deeper and more gloomy.

"On the day after we arrived here I amused myself with walking in the
beautiful gardens with which the place abounds. I have now been long
in these southern lands, but I cannot but believe that the dreams
which transport me nightly back to my German home are the cause for
my feeling everything here so strange and astonishing. At all
events, every morning when I wake I wonder anew, as if I were only
just arrived. So I was walking then, like one infatuated, among the
aloe trees, which were scattered among the laurels and oleanders.
Suddenly a cry sounded near me, and a slender girl, dressed in white,
fled into my arms, fainting, while her companions dispersed past us
in every direction. A soldier can always tolerably soon gather his
senses together, and I speedily perceived a furious bull was pursuing
the beautiful maiden. I threw her quickly over a thickly planted
hedge, and followed her myself, upon which the beast, blind with
rage, passed us by, and I have heard no more of it since, except that
some young knights in an adjacent courtyard had been making a trial
with it previous to a bull-fight, and that it was on this account
that it had broken so furiously through the gardens.

"I was now standing quite alone, with the fainting lady in my arms,
and she was so wonderfully beautiful to look at that I have never in
my life felt happier than I then did, and also never sadder. At last
I laid her down on the turf, and sprinkled her angelic brow, with
water from a neighboring little fountain. And so she came to herself
again, and when she opened her bright and lovely eyes I thought I
could imagine how the glorified spirits must feel in heaven.

"She thanked me with graceful and courteous words, and called me her
knight; but in my state of enchantment I could not utter a syllable,
and she must have almost thought me dumb. At length my speech
returned, and the prayer at once was breathed forth from my heart,