Every Christmas evening the mail brought to the house of the paternal Wohlfart a box containing a loaf of the finest sugar and a quantity of the best coffee. This sugar the good man himself broke into squares: the coffee was roasted by his wife's own hands; and the complacency with which they sipped their first cup was pleasant to behold. These were seasons when, to the childish soul of Anton, the whole house seemed pervaded with poetry, and his father was never weary of telling him the history of this periodical present. Many years ago, he had chanced to find, in a dusty bundle of law-papers, a document of great importance to a well-known mercantile house in the capital. This document he had at once forwarded, and, in consequence of it, the firm had been enabled to gain a long-pending lawsuit, which had previously threatened to go against them; upon which the young head of the concern had written his acknowledgments, and Wohlfart had refused to be thanked, having, he said, only done his duty. From that time forth the box we have described made its appearance every Christmas evening, accompanied by a few cordial lines, to which Wohlfart responded in a masterpiece of caligraphy, expressing his surprise at the unexpected arrival, and wishing a happy new year to the firm. The old gentleman persisted, even to his wife, in treating this Christmas box as a mere accident, a trifle, a whim of some clerk in the house of T. O. Schroeter, and yearly protested against the expectation of its arrival, by which the good woman's household purchases were more or less influenced. But its arrival was, in reality, of the utmost importance in his eyes; and that, not for the sake of the actual coffee and sugar themselves, but of the poetry of this connecting link between him and the life of a perfect stranger. He carefully tied up all the letters of the firm, together with three love-letters from his wife. He became a connoisseur in colonial produce, an oracle in coffee, whose decision was much deferred to by the Ostrau shopkeepers. He began to interest himself in the affairs of the great firm, and never failed to note the ups and downs reported in a certain corner of the newspapers, wholly mysterious to the uninitiated. Nay, he even indulged in fancy speculations and an ideal partnership, chafed when sugars fell, and chuckled at the rise of coffee.