both individual and national. My foster-father's intention was to establish me, after a certain period of probation, in a shop or small business of my own; but the accounts he got of me from my employers were so unsatisfactory, and one or two mad pranks I played caused so much scandal in the town, that he deferred the execution of his plan, and thinking that absence from home, and a strict taskmaster, might be beneficial, he started me off to Frankfort-on-the-Maine, where a clerk's place was ready for me in the office of the long-established and highly respectable firm of Schraube & Co." Here Heinzel broke off the narrative strain into which he had insensibly fallen, and apologised for intruding upon me so commonplace a tale. But he had got into the vein, I saw, and was willing enough to go on; and, on my part, I was curious to hear his story out, although I had already assigned to it, in my mind, the not unnatural termination of flight from a severe employer, renunciation by the adoptive father, and consequent destitution and compulsory enlistment. I begged him to continue, and he did not need much pressing. "Frankfort is a famous place for Jews," continued Heinzel, "and Jews are notoriously sharp men of business; but the entire synagogue might have been searched in vain for a more thorough Hebrew in character and practice than that very Christian merchant, Herr Johann Schraube. He was one of those persons who seem sent into the world for the express purpose of making themselves as disagreeable as possible. A little, bandy-legged, ill-made man, with small ferret's eyes, and a countenance expressive of unbounded obstinacy and self-conceit; he had a pleasant way of repeating his own words when he ought to have listened to the answer, was never known to smile except when he had made somebody miserable, or to grant a favour till he had surlily refused it at least half-a-dozen times. His way of speaking was like the snap of a dog. Every body about him hated and feared him; his wife and children, his servants, his clerks, and even his partner, a tall strapping fellow who could have crushed him with his foot like a weasel, but who, nevertheless, literally trembled in presence of the concentrated bile of his amiable associate. I anticipated a pleasant time of it under the rule of such a domestic tyrant, especially as it had been arranged that I was to live in the house. Accordingly, a bed-chamber was allotted to me. I took my meals, with some others of the clerks, at the lower end of the family dinner-table, and passed ten hours a-day in writing letters and making out accounts. My scanty moments of relaxation I was fain to pass either out of doors or reading in the counting-house; for although nominally treated as one of the family, I could see that my presence in the common sitting-room, was any thing but welcome to Schraube and his circle. Altogether I led a dog's life, and I make no doubt I should have