Very naturally! for old Röper had sold it at public auction, because it was that of Gustavus. But we will follow our two friends again into the _Still Land_.
They had to go by the old palace, which, like an Adam's-rib, had hatched out the new one; which, in its turn, had sent forth new watershoots--a Chinese cottage, a bathing-house, a garden-saloon, a billiard-room, etc. In the new palace dwelt the Resident Lady von Bouse, who did not admire this architectural feature twice in the whole year. Behind the second rear extension of the palace the English garden began with a French, which the Princess had let stand, by way of utilizing the contrast, or of avoiding that which an angular gala-palace assumes by the side of patriarchal Nature in her pastoral attire. Any one who cared not to go by the two palaces could reach the park through a pine grove, coming first into a cloister, of which the old Prince and his favorite chamberlain had been the fathers. Neither of them had been alone half a day in all their lives, except when they were lost on a hunt or _otherwise_; hence they wanted for once to be alone, and therefore--(what cared they if they did perpetrate a plagiarism and a copy of the former Baireuth Eremitage?)--they placed nine small houses first on paper, then on a table, and finally on the earth, or rather nine moss-grown cords of wood. In these puzzle-houses of hollow logs there was lodged Chinese furniture, gold and a live courtier, somewhat as in living trunks of trees one is astonished to come suddenly upon a live toad, because one does not see where the creature's hole is. The logs enclosed a cloister which--as not a soul in the whole court had any disposition to be a living hermit--was committed to a wooden one, who silently and sensibly sat therein and meditated and reflected as much as is possible for such a man to do. They had provided the Anchorite with some ascetic works from the Scheerau school-library, which suited him well enough and exhorted him to a mortification of the flesh which he already had. The great, or the greatest, either are represented or themselves represent something; but they seldom are anything; others must eat, write, enjoy, love, conquer, for them, and they themselves, again, do so for others; hence it is fortunate that, as they have no soul of their own to enjoy a monastic life and find no other that can, they can at least hunt up among the carvers wooden business-agents who can enjoy the recluse life for them; but I only wish that the great ones, who never suffer more _ennui_ than in their pastimes, would have made and placed before their parks, before their orchestras, their libraries, and their nurseries, such solid and inanimate agents and canopy-bearers or _curatores absentis_ of pleasure and _fair_-weather, lightning-conductors, either hewn out in stone or merely embossed in wax.