"This Herr von Albin was my father. He loved my mother with touching tenderness, and did everything in his power to prevent her from feeling the great difference in their ages. He took journeys with her, and as German society pleased her far better than the formal Danish etiquette of those days, lived by turns upon his Holstein estates in summer, and the North German City of B---- in winter. Thus it happens that my whole nature is thoroughly North German, and I have also inculcated some of it into Cornelia's mind. When I was in my fourteenth year I lost my father, and my mother, then scarcely thirty, was still very girlish in her appearance, and equally so in character. The death of the kind husband whom she had loved with childlike reverence was the first sorrow of her life. "With the same obedience with which she had formerly married Herr von Albin she now, at her father's command, wedded a second husband; but this time she did not rejoice over beautiful strawberries. "My stepfather, an attaché of the Danish Embassy in N----, was very rich; and as my father's estates were entailed an male heirs, and my mother had also inherited little or nothing, my grandfather, whose property likewise reverted to the crown at his death, wished by this marriage to secure his daughter a future free from care. But whether my mother was happy with this man I will leave you to decide. He was a cold aristocrat, chose society which was distasteful to us, and left us much alone at a retired country seat, where we led a life devoted to books and belles-lettres. "Chance made me acquainted with a young officer, who, despite his youth, was already a widower, and the father of a little two-year-old daughter. We loved each other, and he asked for my hand; but my stepfather refused his consent, because the marriage did not suit his plans for me, and perhaps, also, because he had no inclination to give me a dowry. What a nature that young man possessed! Alas! he bore the doom of an early death. During our stay at our country seat my mother sometimes permitted him to visit us. She became constantly sadder and paler, and the only hours that she seemed more animated and joyous were those we all spent together. I sang and played upon the piano passably well, and the choral we have just mentioned, which was peculiarly in harmony with my Edmund's religious feelings, I sang for him again and again. We spent many such evenings as this together, and were never happier than when assembled around the steaming tea-urn in North German fashion. My friend often said it would be charming if its confused humming could be transformed into a distinct melody, for he found all the charm of northern sentimentality in its mysterious music.