I have given this little sketch merely to connect the events together, without at all wishing to imply that I knew or comprehended all the facts at the time, or recollect them now, except with the aid of books. My own memories are very slight and merely personal. I remember lingering on for some months in that small house by the Rhine. I recollect the warm, bright summer sinking down into heavy autumn, and the year withering in the old age of winter. I recollect numerous reports and rumors, and gossip’s tales, and—falser than all—newspaper narratives, and printed dispatches, reaching us in our solitude, some of them exciting my wonder, and some of them my alarm, and then I recollect various passages of no great importance in a somewhat long journey, till I find myself in a quaint old town upon the border of Switzerland, near which the Rhine breaks over high rocks and forms the cascade of Schaffhausen. This place is only notable in my memory for the beauty of the water-fall, which I have since seen surpassed in grandeur, but not in picturesque effect, and by one little incident which there brightened many an hour. One day, when we were there, a letter was delivered to Father Bonneville, in my presence, which he found to contain a small note addressed to me. It was the first letter I had ever received in my life, although I was now between fourteen and fifteen years of age, and the sensations which I experienced when it was placed in my hands, and I saw my own name on the back, were very strange. Imagination went whirling here and there, seeking to divine whence it could come. The mystery of my own strange, isolated existence—which was frequently present to my thoughts, was the first thing that fancy snatched at; but I did not remain long in uncertainty. The seal was soon broken, and I found a few lines in a round, childlike hand, very well written, and very well expressed, with the name of “Mariette de Salins” at the bottom. She told me that she wrote to show me, her dear instructor, how much progress she had made in her studies; and to tell me that although she had now a great number of companions, she loved me as well as ever, and better than them all. She bade me not forget her though she did not doubt that I had grown a great, tall man, and she was still but a little girl. I cannot express how much pleasure this gave me; for I had been oppressed by the thought that in new scenes and new circumstances, all memory of her young companion would soon be obliterated in the mind of my little Mariette. That such had not yet been the case was in itself a pleasure; but I calculated sagaciously that the very fact of having to write to me, and to recall our youthful intercourse would renew all her recollections of the time we had passed together, and give memory, as it were, a new point to start from.