CHAPTER XIV. 



A TRAGEDY IN THE ROYAL MEWS. 



"In my shop of drugs are stored 

 Many things of sweet accord ; 

 Spices with sugar I combine, 

 Enemas and purges I divine. 

 To strengthen the weak and the sickly, 

 Refreshing draughts I furnish quickly; 

 All these with utmost care, 

 On prescriptions, I prepare." 



Hans Sachs. 



IN A sultry evening in midsummer a group of peas- 

 ants were busy weeding the plants and trimming 

 the shrubs in the stiffly designed pleasure garden 

 of the Emperor, that formed such an agreeable 

 feature of the low ground bordering the north side of the 

 Hradschin. Directing their labors with taste and skill was 

 a fair-haired, comely young man of attractive presence, whose 

 intellectual physiognomy stamped him as a man superior to 

 those working with spade and pruning-knife. In the admir- 

 able disposition of the blooming plants and in the grouping 

 of the small trees, the young florist showed the taste of a 

 landscape artist ; and his close inspection of the parts of a 

 rare blossom that he picked off the ground from beneath a 

 foreign-looking plant, showed that he had acquired the scien- 

 tific method of looking at flowers characteristic of a botanist. 

 He separated the leaf-shaped, brightly colored parts of the 



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