eyes of a child, in this abode of vice and crime? "My dear young friend, I would that the answer were more difficult. Would that it were not the same formula by which I can calculate the equation of your life also. Would that I did not know that the unnaturalness of our relations is like a poisonous simoon that withers the grass and even strips the leaves from the oak. "I have endeavored from what I before knew of you, and from what you so frankly have confided to me of your earlier life, of your family affairs, of the life and customs of the citizens of your native town, to form a background upon which I might design your portrait. And how cheerless it is, lying in the dim light in which all things now seem to lie with us! Everywhere littleness, narrow-mindedness, restrictions, blind adhesion to old formulas, pedantic ceremoniousness, everywhere the free outlook into life shut out by high walls of prejudice. You have told me that you besought your father to let you go to sea, and that he steadfastly insisted that you should be a man of learning, or at least follow an official career. It was certainly not, as you accused yourself, a mere inclination to idleness or a hankering after adventures that again and again prompted this wish; and assuredly your father, whatever his reasons, did not do well so obstinately to reject it. He had lost one son at sea--very well; there is another sea, the sea of happy, active, energetic life, in which all faculties have their free play. This he should not have forbidden you; and this was really the sea for which you longed, of which the ocean with its storms was but the image, though you took it for the reality. "Your father did not do well; yet we cannot reckon with him, rendered gloomy by domestic misfortune, too soon left alone in the world, and irritated by his son's resistance. But what can we say of your pedantic teachers, not one of whom could comprehend a youth whose character is openness itself? What of your worthy friends who raised a hue and cry over the profligate who was leading their sons into mischief, and who held it a devout work to widen the breach between father and son? Many an honest German youth has been in your case, my friend; brought up under such desperately stringent social restrictions, that he thanks heaven, when, in the far west of America, under the trees of the primeval forest, he hears no more about social order. True, in your flight from the oppressive narrowness of your father's house, you did not get so far as the American forests, but unhappily, only as far as the woods of the Zehrenburg, and this filled up the measure of your misfortunes.