"The daughter very soon after lost her heretofore shyness, and raised her eyes pleasantly, because she knew it did not displease her mother, and she had now a right to make herself pleasant. We had neither of us had any romantic training, otherwise she would not have waited for this till I had spoken and had obtained the mothers consent. Thus this affair, which was so difficult and so important for me, took a smooth course, without the intervention of any other person, or the employment of those arts or intrigues with which brides are entrapped by many. "It is not necessary for me to tell the holy and humble thankfulness of my soul to God, nor how much I endeavoured to preserve my inward peace and tranquillity, in spite of the gossip that followed upon this my resolution. "I immediately investigated the character of my bride; she had an agreeable aspect, although the smallpox, which she had passed through after she was grown up, had materially injured her complexion. Her education had been carried on partly under the eyes of a grandmother and an excellent aunt, partly by the mother, who kept a tutor for her and her brother. After the death of the father, the mother and daughter had lived in great retirement. But she had only the more cultivated all those qualifications which are most advantageous to her sex; her judgment was so good, that her mother generally preferred it to her own in household arrangements. The style of her letters was good, the handwriting pretty and even, and there were very few faults of orthography. In this she excelled all her many relations. Accounts she understood far better than her mother, and had, when scarcely fifteen years of age, during a long absence of her mother, so accurately reckoned up the details of an income of 1800 gulden, that there was nothing missing. She had for some years kept her own accounts in respect of a property which she had inherited from an uncle at Coburg, amounting to a thousand gulden or more. She had learned to dance, and held herself well, but was not particularly fond of it; her head-dresses she made herself, and many of her clothes, and always in good taste. This pleasure in the work of her own hands was considered by others of her own age, who had no such pleasure in it, as the result of great parsimony, which it certainly was not, as I shall presently show.