moral frosty weather, like alabaster garden statues in the physical, when the former and the latter have soft, absorbing veins, get cracks, and break.

Thus matters stood with her on a weighty day, when he found with her little Julia. This beloved name she affixed to the child of the Senior, Flamin's landlord, in order to keep alive her sad yearning after her dead Giulia by a similarity of sound, by the relic of an echo. "This funereal tone," said Victor to himself, "is indeed to her the welcome distant roll of the hearse which shall come to take her to the friend of her youth; and her expectation of a like fate is truly the most mournful evidence of a like grief." If anything further was needed to purify his friendship from all love, it was this swift falling-off of the leaves of so fair a passion-flower;–towards the suffering, one is ashamed of the least selfishness. During the conversation, from which the jealous Julia was excluded by not understanding it, the child in a pet twitched at the servants' bell; for girls make claims to attention eight years earlier than boys. Clotilda forbade this ringing by a too late interdict; the little one, delighted that she had set in motion the chambermaid, who came hastening up, tried again to twitch at the cord. Clotilda said in French to the Doctor, "One must not give her any command too monarchically; now she will not rest till I have tried my extremest method." "Julia!" said she once more, her large eye overflowing with love; but in vain. "Well, now I am going to die!" said she, already dying away, and leaned her fair head, inhabited by a departing genius, back against the chair, and closed her pure eyes, which deserved to open again only in a heaven.–While Victor stood in silent emotion before the still–tranced one, and thought to himself: "If now she should never wake again, and thou shouldst vainly snatch her stiff hand, and her last word on this dreary earth should have been, 'Now I am going to die,'–O God! would there be any other remedy for the inconsolableness of her friend than a sword and the last wound? And I should clasp with a cold hand her hand, and say, I go with thee!" As he thought thus, and as the little one, weeping, lifted the sinking right hand, her countenance really grew paler, and the left hand glided down from her lap;–here was that sword's sharp edge drawn across his heart;–but soon she opened her wandering eyes again, coming out of the drowsiness of the death-sleep to herself and to a sense of shame. She excused the transient swoon with the remark, "I have done as that player^[2] did with the urn of his child: I imagined myself in the place of my Giulia in her last moments, but a little too successfully."

He was just on the point of drawing up medical pastoral letters against this consuming enthusiasm,–so much does an unhappy love translate every female heart from the major tone into the minor, even that of a Clotilda, whose forehead had a manly elevation, and whose chin expressed almost more courage than beauty,–when quite other pastoral letters arrived. The bearer of them was Victor's happier friend Agatha. Send back with thy laugh, thou untroubled one, life into two hearts on which death has flung his flying cloud-shadows! She fell confidingly into two friendly arms; but towards her doctor brother, who so long, instead of his whole person, had let only his hand, i. e. his handwriting, go to St. Luna, she was still shy. But this fault of his, when he had avoided a house one quarter of a year for reasons, of absenting himself from it another quarter of a year without reason,–this fault I cannot wholly condemn, because I–have it myself. She could not satisfy her eyes with looking at him; her blooming country face showed him, instead of his present passion-week of grief, a red chalk drawing of his and her vanished days of joy in the parsonage-garden. He solemnly promised her to be her Easter guest with her brother, and, instead of heads and windows, to break nothing but eggs; he rested not till he was the same old Sebastian and she the same old Agatha again. As she delivered to the two court-people, smiling only from love, the long duodecimo history of the village and her father, not at all as a compiler or epitomist, or in a mutilated edition, but in volumes as long as her heel-ligaments; then did Clotilda and Victor feel how soothing to them was this descent from the glittering, sharp court-glaciers into the soft vales of the middling stations of life, and they both yearned to exchange polished hearts for warm ones. Among men and Borsdorf apples the best are not the smooth ones, but the rough ones that have some warts. This longing for sincere souls, too, it may well have been which wrung from Clotilda the assertion, that there were mismatches only between souls, not between ranks. Hence came her growing love for this Agatha, who bloomed outside of the forcing-box of a genealogical tree only in the common pasture,–a love which the reader and I in the first volume, from sharp-sightedness, explained as the hiding-cloak of another love toward Flamin, and which ought to wean us both from bringing a reproach upon a heroine, who in the sequel continually refutes it.

The superscription of the thick letter-packet which Agatha brought was in the handwriting of Emanuel, whom Clotilda got to superscribe everything to the parson's wife, in order to save her stepmother the trouble of–closing her letters. Madame Le Baut had learned this insight into documents, this Socratic art of midwifery, in the ministry, which possesses the right of search into the letters of all subjects, because it can hold them either as infected or arrested, if it please. While the step-daughter, in the adjoining chamber, broke open the outer packet, because from its thickness she prophesied an enclosed communication for the Doctor: the latter breathed, by chance–or design, for he had, this long time, established everywhere his deciphering offices of women, in the narrowest corner, in every fold of a dress, in the marks of books which had been read,–he breathed, I said, accidentally on the window-panes, on which one can then at once read what a warm finger has written thereon. There came out, after the involuntary breathing, nothing but French initial S's, sketched with the finger-nail. "S!" thought he, "that is singular; that is the beginning of my own name."

His conjectures were interrupted by Clotilda's returning with a face blissfully cleared of all its clouds, and, handing to the thoughtful Medicus a great letter from Emanuel. Upon the heels of this second pleasure followed, in the place of the third, a piece of news; she now disclosed to him, "that Emanuel had at last enabled her to be an obedient, though not believing patient." She had, namely, hitherto suppressed the purpose of her obedience and her spring cure, until her friend in Maienthal had secured her for some spring months a sick-chamber at the Abbess's,–the very one Giulia had had,–that the fanning of spring might there lift her drooping pinions, the incense of flowers heal her torn heart, and the great friend enable his great friend to stand upright.

Victor slipped away hastily, not only from hunger and thirst after what he held in his hand, but because a new flood of thought broke through his old trains of ideas. "Bastian!" said Bastian to himself on the way, "I have often held thee to be stupid, but so stupid as that–no, never. It is sinful that a man, a court-medicus, a thinker, should ruminate for months, often half-evenings together, and yet not bring the matter out, till he hears it, now for the first time. Verily, even the 'S' on the window fits!" The reader and I will take out of his hands the thing with which he is stoning himself before our faces; for he throws at