“They were as good as their word. I had no sooner descended to a private station than I was made to feel all the severities of their displeasure. They took away my license to sell salt and tobacco, and thereby fully one half of my little income; they tried to withdraw my privilege to sell wine, but this came from the municipality, and they could not touch it. Upon information that they had suborned, they twice visited my house to search for seditious papers, and, finally, they made me such a mark of their enmity that the timid of the townsfolk were afraid to be seen with me, and gradually dropped my acquaintance. This preyed upon me most of all. I was all my life of a social habit; I delighted to gather my friends around me, or to go and visit them, and to find myself, as I was growing old, growing friendless too, was a great blow. “I was a widower, and had none but an only daughter.” When he had reached thus far, his voice failed him, and, after an effort or two, he could not continue, and turned away his head and buried it in his hands. Full ten minutes elapsed before he resumed, which he did with a hard, firm tone, as though resolved not to be conquered by his emotion. “The cholera was dreadfully severe all through the Italian Tyrol; it swept from Venice to Milan, and never missed even the mountain villages, far away up the Alps. In our little hamlet we lost one hundred and eighteen souls, and my Gretchen was one of them. “We had all grown to be very hard-hearted to each other; misfortune was at each man's door, and he had no heart to spare for a neighbor's grief; and yet such was the sorrow for her, that they came, in all this suffering and desolation, to try and comfort and keep me up, and though it was a time when all such cares were forgotten, the young people went and laid fresh flowers over her grave every morning. Well, that was very kind of them, and made me weep heartily; and, in weeping, my heart softened, and I got to feel that God knew what was best for all of us, and that, may-bap, he had taken her away to spare her greater sorrow hereafter, and left me to learn that I should pray to go to her. She had only been in the earth eight days, and I was sitting alone in my solitary house, for I could not bear to open the shop, and began to think that I *d never have the courage to do so again, but would go away and try some other place and some other means of livelihood,--it was while thinking thus, a sharp, loud knock came to the door, and I arose rather angrily, to answer it.