"In a week I shall be fifteen years old, and next month my course here will be finished, and I shall be fitted to take my place in the school as a teacher. Once more I turn to you and entreat you, dear father, let me come home to you! I will not be any burden to you. My teachers will tell you that I know enough to enable a young girl to earn her own living. I thank and bless you a thousand times, dearest father, for having me educated to be a useful member of society. I will be my cousin's maid, and work for her for my support, if I may only be near you! Oh, I pray you yield to my entreaties! You have always answered my request by telling me that her bad example--her irreligion and hardness of heart--would have a ruinous effect upon me. But indeed, dear father, this could not be. Thanks to my good, kind teachers, I am so firm in my faith, I have been so well trained, that this one bad example could not have any effect upon me, especially when I should daily see how my poor father suffers in discharging his guardianship of so stubborn a creature. Why did my dead uncle Hartwich bequeath to you such a thankless office? Indeed, dearest father, it would be easier if you would let me help you. I would leave nothing untried to soften her heart and turn it to good, and, however angry she might be with me, I would disarm her by patience and submission; and, even although I could have no effect upon her, I could be something to you, dear father. Oh, how heavenly it would be to sit alone together in your room after the day's work was finished! I could sit at your feet and show you my sketches and drawings, drinking draughts from the rich treasures of your mind and cheering you with my ever-ready nonsense. And sometimes I could lean my head upon your heart, that no one understands as well as the child to whom you have shown all its depths of tenderness, and sleep as peacefully as in those dear childish days when you cradled me in your arms with all a mother's care! Oh, father, you are everything in the world to me! My mother, who forsook me when I was so young--who left you for another so immeasurably your inferior, I do not know--I can form no image of her, unlovely as she must be, in my mind. You are mother, father, everything, to me! My cradle stood by your bedside; your eyes smiled upon me when I awoke. You never spoke a harsh word to me, you never looked unkindly at me. You treated the wayward child, who must so often have vexed you, with unvarying gentleness and patience; and at last you sent me from you, that I might be thoroughly trained and educated, since it is our fate to earn our daily bread. You sent me from you, but I saw plainly, when we parted, that this was the greatest sacrifice of all,--that I carried away your whole heart with me. You did it for me,--out of affection for me. You have given me up now for almost seven years, and I have worked and studied as hard as I could,