for the inconsolableness of her friend than a sword and the last wound? And I should clasp with a cold hand her hand, and say, I go with thee!" As he thought thus, and as the little one, weeping, lifted the sinking right hand, her countenance really grew paler, and the left hand glided down from her lap;--here was that sword's sharp edge drawn across his heart;--but soon she opened her wandering eyes again, coming out of the drowsiness of the death-sleep to herself and to a sense of shame. She excused the transient swoon with the remark, "I have done as that player[2] did with the urn of his child: I imagined myself in the place of my Giulia in her last moments, but a little too successfully." He was just on the point of drawing up medical pastoral letters against this consuming enthusiasm,--so much does an unhappy love translate every female heart from the _major_ tone into the _minor_, even that of a Clotilda, whose forehead had a manly elevation, and whose chin expressed almost more courage than beauty,--when quite other pastoral letters arrived. The bearer of them was Victor's _happier_ friend Agatha. Send back with thy laugh, thou untroubled one, life into two hearts on which death has flung his flying cloud-shadows! She fell confidingly into two friendly arms; but towards her doctor brother, who so long, instead of his whole person, had let only his hand, i. e. his handwriting, go to St. Luna, she was still shy. But this fault of his, when he had avoided a house one quarter of a year _for_ reasons, of absenting himself from it another quarter of a year _without_ reason,--this fault I cannot wholly condemn, because I--have it myself. She could not satisfy her eyes with looking at him; her blooming country face showed him, instead of his present passion-week of grief, a red chalk drawing of his and her vanished days of joy in the parsonage-garden. He solemnly promised her to be her Easter guest with her brother, and, instead of heads and windows, to break nothing but eggs; he rested not till he was the same old Sebastian and she the same old Agatha again. As she delivered to the two court-people, smiling only from love, the long duodecimo history of the village and her father, not at all as a compiler or epitomist, or in a mutilated edition, but in volumes as long as her heel-ligaments; then did Clotilda and Victor feel how soothing to them was this descent from the glittering, sharp court-glaciers into the soft vales of the middling stations of life, and they both yearned to exchange polished hearts for warm ones. Among men and Borsdorf apples the best are not the smooth ones, but the rough ones that have some warts. This longing for sincere souls, too, it may well have been which wrung from Clotilda the assertion, that there were mismatches only between souls, not between ranks. Hence came her growing love for this Agatha, who bloomed outside of the forcing-box of a genealogical tree only in the common