“My Dear Clara,—I leave you for a time. How long the time will be, Heaven only knows! What it has cost me to break away from you and our sweet babe, no one but myself will ever know. I meant all for the best; it was to increase your property—not with a reckless indifference as to consequences—that I made that ruinous adventure in the West. The failure almost broke my heart. But I will retrieve the loss. I vowed to do so when the disaster came; and I mean to fulfill that vow, if it cost me the labor of a whole life. Happily, enough is left to keep you and our babe from want. Bear my absence, if you can, without repining. Do not think my affection for you has grown cold; it has but increased in fervor since our marriage, and absence will make it the more intense. Ah, me! How do our errors, like seed cast into the ground, reproduce themselves a hundred fold! I erred at first, and error has since followed me like a shadow. May Heaven keep you, my dear wife, until my return. It is best for me to go away. To be happy under present circumstances, is impossible. I am crushed to the earth, and if I remain here, will lie powerless. It may be a weakness in me to feel as I do; but I did not make myself, and cannot help it. Oh! how often have I wished that you had been without a dollar and without a friend. How tenderly would I have cherished you! How light would the hardest labor have been, if it but produced flowers in your pathway! Let me make a confession. It is wrung from me almost in tears. But we may never meet again, and I would not have you misunderstand me, nor feel a doubt, when you think of me, overshadowing your mind. I loved my art with a passion that few can understand. But I was poor, and had to work in my profession for bread, when I longed to go only in pursuit of the beautiful, and to labor for the attainment of what was excellent in the profession I had chosen. How blessed would I have been with a competence! A few hundred a year would have filled the measure of my desires. Bread and water would have sufficed for my natural wants, could I have breathed under an Italian sky, and lived among the wonderful creations of those master-spirits who have made our art immortal. It was thus with me, when, in an evil hour, a friend suggested a marriage in which money should be the first consideration. I threw the suggestion aside with a feeling of indignation. He re-presented it, drawing at the same time a picture upon which I could not look without a quickening pulse. I in Italy, and a loving wife by my side, sketching and painting amid the perfect works of art that fill the galleries of every city in that beautiful land. I looked at the picture, and my heart stirred within me. Then you were mentioned; but I rejected the thought of any end in marriage lower than affection for the person, abstract from all other considerations. But every time I looked upon you after this came the dream of Italy; I saw myself there, and you by my side. It was in