"And now the floodgates were opened. It was all over with our model household. It came out why our daughter had been driven to misery and our son to death. Our friends could not help assuming a certain air of pity toward us, that broke my wife's heart and drove me from the city. I went to North Germany, and there I buried my wife a year later. Soon after I gave up painting. I looked upon engraving, with all its drudgery, as an instrument of chastisement--as a mode of daily forcing down my pride. My dishonored name had become hateful to me, and I had laid it aside when I left Bavaria, But I did not neglect to have an appeal to my outcast child inserted in all the newspapers, begging her to return to her solitary father, to forgive him, and to help him bear his remaining years of life. "No answer ever came, although I continued to have the notice inserted for many years. "At last I became thoroughly convinced that she was no longer in this world; and no sooner did this belief, which it had taken ten years to beat into my head, become a settled conviction, than a singular transformation took place in me. I grew calm again, after all my wretched experiences, and at peace with myself; there were times when I had difficulty in recognizing in my present self the man whose guilt and foolishness had worked so much misery. I succeeded so well in outliving my old nature, in working a complete regeneration of my inner man, that I actually felt something like curiosity to see the city in which my predecessor had suffered so much sorrow and shame. "And so, one day, I came back to Munich, though I scarcely knew it again, for everything at whose birth I had assisted was now completed, and besides a new world had sprung up. Nor did the old city recognize me either. I had grown a white-headed, quiet, solitary man, bore another name, and lived like a hermit--never going out during the day, unless, perhaps, to visit the studio of one of the younger artists who had settled here since my day. It has sometimes happened that I have found myself in a beer-garden seated next to some boon companion of the days of my prosperity, who had no idea who the silent old man was who was eating and drinking at the same table with him. "And this is the way I have gone on for six or seven years, counting myself always among the departed spirits, and sometimes startled at the sight of my own face if I chanced to catch a glimpse of it in the mirror. It is incredible, my dear friend, how tough the thread of life is sometimes. For really had it not been for my interest in art, and in some good young friends who have shown me confidence and respect, the whole world would have been a blank to me. Besides, when photography came into such general use, it seemed to me that my graver was a very superfluous sort of thing, of little further use except to multiply copies of business cards, labels on wine-bottles, and other things of that sort.