“Oh, no, I shouldn’t at all care to,—the stuff is too crazy.” There was a good deal more of talk back and forth about the unconventional advertisement, but I did not betray by the change of a feature that I was the criminal. In sending in the advertisement I had at the same time written to the editor of the _Presse_ to collect the answers that came in, and, after the lapse of some days, to dispatch them to Klosterneuburg, _poste restante_, under a certain cipher. Five days later we were going by the post office on our usual walk. “Please, aunt,” said I, “let us go in; I want to buy stamps.” We went in. But at the window, instead of asking for stamps, I inquired, “Is there anything for A—R 25?” The clerk looked, and handed me a bulky package. My heart leaped into my throat with joy. “What does that mean?” cried the others. “You’ll find out at home.” When we reached home I tore open the envelope and let about sixty or seventy letters fall on the table, all bearing the address _Cela n’engage à rien_. “Look, these are the answers to my advertisement—I’m the brother and sister!” “And there’s my letter too,” cried Elvira, pulling out a missive on which she recognized her own writing, “that’s mean!” and she tore it into little bits. “So you did answer in spite of my prohibition!” said Aunt Lotti in indignant tones. “And you send advertisements to the paper behind the backs of us all?” added my mother, not less indignant. “You are a nice pair of children!” “Well, to pay for it we now have the entertainment of reading all this,” I said soothingly. And the reading did in fact prove very amusing. Some of the answers were imbecile, but others were witty; and among the witty ones were some so interesting that we decided to reply to them, anonymously of course, and this time with our mothers’ permission. A letter from a lady, signed “Doris in See,” had especially captivated Elvira. She assumed the rôle of the “brother” in the advertisement, and entered into a correspondence with Doris in See which soon became very lively. I too selected some correspondents, but the letters soon petered out. My cousin, however, wrote Miss Doris longer and longer letters and poems, fuller and fuller of devotion, and whole treatises too on the most various topics; and Doris wrote as assiduously to Mr. “Kurt im Walde”—that was the name that Elvira signed. A whole year long the manuscripts—they could no longer be called letters—flew back and forth; the two souls had actually gone out to each other in full exchange. Then conscience awoke in Elvira. “Doris thinks I am a young man; she will be falling in love with me yet; I must confess to her that her comrade Kurt is a girl.” And she did. Back came a voice of jubilation: “Glorious! my best friend, my poet and thinker Kurt, is a young woman, and Doris—I must tell it now—is an officer in his Royal and Imperial Majesty’s navy.”