The lamp-lighted room looked the picture of comfort as the four sat down to dinner. The merchant raised his glass. "Welcome to your country! Welcome home!" cried Sabine. Anton replied, in a low tone, "I have a country, I have a home in which I am happy; I owe both to your kindness. Many an evening, when sitting in some wretched inn, far away among savage strangers, whose language I imperfectly understood, I have thought of this table, and of the delight it would be to me to see this room and your face once more; for it is the bitterest thing on earth to be alone in hours of relaxation and repose without a friend, without any thing that one loves." As he bade them good-night, the principal said, "Wohlfart, I wish to bind you still more closely to this firm. Jordan is leaving us next quarter to become a partner in his uncle's business; I can not appoint a better man than you to fill his place." When Anton returned to his room, he felt what mortal man is seldom allowed to feel here below, unpunished by a reverse--that he was perfectly happy, without a regret and without a wish. He sat on the sofa, looked at the flowers and at the cushion, and again saw in fancy Sabine bending over his hand. He had sat there long enjoying this vision, when his eye fell upon a letter on the table, the postmark "New York," the direction in Fink's hand. Fink, when he first left, had written more than once to Anton, but only a few lines at a time, telling nothing of his occupation, nor his plans for the future. Then a long interval passed away, during which Anton had had no tidings from his friend, and only knew that he spent a good deal of his time in traveling in the Western States of the Union as manager of the business of which his uncle had been the head, and in the interest of several other companies in which the deceased had had shares. But it was with horror that he now read the following letter: "It must out at last, though I would gladly have kept it from you, poor boy! I have joined thieves and murderers. If you want any thing of the kind done, apply to me. I envy a fellow who becomes a villain by choice; he has at least the pleasure of driving a good bargain with Satan, and can select the particular sort of good-for-nothingness which suits his tastes; but my lot is less satisfactory. I have been, through the pressure of rascalities invented by others, driven into a way of life which is as much like highway robbery as one hair is to another. "Like a rock in an avalanche, I, pressed on all sides, have got frozen into the midst of the most frightful speculations ever devised by a usurer's brain. My departed uncle was good enough to make me heir to his favorite branch of business--land speculations.