By the kind offices of the good old professor, I obtained several other pupils, and I had the great happiness of finding my income exceed my expenditure. I threw off my traveling garb; I brought out from my knapsack the clothing which I had so carefully saved: I gained admittance into some of the society of the town, and though I do not think I was ever very vain, whatever vanity I had, received some encouragement. But my favorite resort was still the professor’s house. He and his daughter were my first friends in the city, and I became more and more intimate with him every day. He was pleased with the progress his daughter made, and he was also pleased with the little assistance which I gave him, from time to time, in different works he was compiling. While I wrote for him, or looked out passages for him, he could fidget about the room at his case, and get into every corner of it in five minutes. At the end of a month, I had a general invitation to spend my evenings there whenever I pleased—and I did please very often. Then, after a while, I was sent with Louise to church; for she went regularly, although I can’t say that the professor ever wore out the steps of any religious edifice, and I took care not to allow my Roman Catholic education to prevent my joining a Protestant congregation, with my pretty little pupil. Indeed I was hanging at this time very slightly by the skirts of the garments of Rome. I had been reading the Bible a great deal lately. I read some Romanist books also, but I found that the two did not agree, and I liked the Bible best. Besides all this, as spring succeeded to winter, and days lengthened, and suns grew warm, there was every now and then a moment of very sweet, spring-like happiness, when after attending the church, Louise and I took a farther walk, till the hour of the good professor’s dinner. Sometimes we had another walk, too, in the evening, and sometimes he accompanied us to his little garden with the summer-house, near the gate of which I had first met him. It was all very delightful; and my ambition, which had once been strong and wide, had by this time shrunk to very small proportions. I could have been contented to linger on there, with every thing just as it was, for an indefinite period of time. But it must be remembered, that not one word, regarding love, ever passed between Louise and myself, except when it occurred in passages of books. I am afraid, however, that those passages, about this time, occurred very often. Louise was fond of them, and I turned them up easily for her.