xviii Editor's Introduction 



must therefore please, whether in Paris or Pekin, in 

 town or country. The greatest experience of society 

 could not give more ease and address, and no girl of 

 fifteen could blush more sweetly or jest more joyously, 

 and yet her life had been the most simple and uniform, 

 and her youth was rather the unfading youth of the 

 soul than that of the body, for she was the mother of 

 four children, nearly thirty, and just recovered from an 

 attack of the lungs which had threatened to prove fatal. 

 But the fire of all her movements, the lightning flashes 

 of her conversation, had all the freshness and all the 

 charm of youth, giving a resistless loveliness to the 

 gentleness of her nature. 



Here is, doubtless, a somewhat exaggerated 

 picture of his imagination. An attractive woman 

 there was, but not just such a woman as he de- 

 picts her. Inspired, possibly, by some stray mem- 

 ory of Byron's verses which he greatly admired, 

 in any case, transfusing a homely incident of his 

 travels with the glow of his imagination, he 

 simply did what he was always doing with his 

 landscape architecture, and often afterwards in 

 other ways in the changeful phases of his varied 

 life. 



Piickler's career in England was quite typical 

 of the man ; going to that country to recuper- 

 ate his fortunes in some mysterious way, he trav- 

 eled like a grajid seigneur in the most expensive 

 manner; then, when funds were short or carriage 

 lacking, on horseback or even on foot. His lit- 

 erary imagination found vent at this time in let- 

 ters to his divorced wife, and, strange to say, 

 then and afterwards his beloved companion and 



