After I had left his business, he had not found a suitable editor for the magazines I had founded. He himself had no gift for editing. They very quickly lost in value; the subscribers cancelled; they were discontinued. But this was not all. Nothing at all seemed to work out for him. One loss followed after another, and now, the situation was thus that he could no longer evade Hamlet's question of "to be or not to be". Just in this very moment, he had pondered the matter by whom or what he could be saved, but in vain. Then, the two of us had come in, like being heaven-sent. And now he knew, that he would be saved, saved by me, by a novel of mine, by the beautiful, young, kind woman of my heart, who would not leave me alone with this matter, until the novel was in his hands. This sly fellow had, by means of this crude praise, completely assured himself of my inexperienced wife's assistance. He urged me to fulfil his wish, and she joined in. He was clever enough to suggest to me that basically it was only me who was to blame for his present bad situation. Six years ago, everything had been extraordinary well; but when I refused to marry his sister-in-law and left my job as an editor, everything had turned completely into the opposite. To undo this damage, he said, I was morally practically obliged, to give him a hand, now. As far as this final thought was concerned, I felt very well that there was some truth in it. My willingness to marry the sister of Mrs. Münchmeyer had, at that time, been taken so much for granted, that they were talking about it everywhere. By rejecting this plan, not just this girl, but the entire family as well, had suffered an almost public humiliation, which, though it was not my fault, moved me to do Münchmeyer some kind of a favour to repair the damage. Furthermore, there had been no argument between us, but we had parted as friends. So there could be no personal reason, only perhaps one relating to business, to reject his wish. But concerning business, there also was no compelling reason to refuse. I had time; I just had to take it. The fact that Münchmeyer published colportage did not compel me to write for him nothing but a trashy colportage-novel. It could be something better, an evolving sequence of traveller's tales, as I delivered to Pustet and other publishers. If I did so, this would at the same time serve my life's work as well, and just it had been planned for the Hausschatz-tales, I could, what I wrote for Münchmeyer, also have published in books later on for my own benefit.