"A child who will soon be motherless too," exclaimed her uncle, "if you go on thus destroying your health by such unchristian want of fortitude. Every thing has its season; your year of widowhood is past, and as you are no longer entitled to wear black, so your mind too must cast off the mourning in which it has been too closely enveloped, and you must begin again to live for the world, to which, after all, you belong. If you were a papist, you might bury your grief in a cloister, for ought I should care; but that won't do now; and, besides, you have important and sacred duties upon you. The property that you have to preserve for the son of a beloved husband requires a stout protector in these stormy times. A woman's bringing up, too, will not be sufficient for him, and you'll not like to let him go from you so soon; therefore you must give him a father who, with all love and earnestness, will make an honourable knight out of him. In a word, you must marry again." "Spare me such language, uncle," cried Althea, rising and putting down the child. But with gentle violence he forced her back into the chair again, saying, "It becomes youth to listen to the well-meant admonitions of age, even though it should not happen to relish them: I keep to my position. You least of all have occasion to complain of the want of wooers. There is Hans Hund of Ingersdorf, Adam von Schweinicher of Wenigmoknau; then there is your own cousin: all of whom would with pleasure break their necks for a kind look from you, and are besides brave knights and in good circumstances." "How can you, even in jest, propose to sacrifice me to these rude companions, who have no enjoyment except in hunting, gambling, drinking, and quarrelling; and who would only make me miss so much the more painfully the mild pious disposition of my Henry?" "Why to be sure our knights are somewhat tough and knotty, but so are our oaks, and they afford a glorious wood for lasting. Mill-wheels are not to be cut out of poplars. For the rest, a shrewd handsome woman must know how to tame a rake, and every one will respect the female slipper when it is wielded merely for a man's benefit." "God deliver me from such a castigatory office; I should soon sink under it." --"Or if you long for a great fortune, you have but to give the sign: I have observed how Christopher Friend, whom you have drawn hither, circles about you at a distance. He is a brisk widower, who was rich from the first, and to that has inherited much from his late wife, the Lauterbachin from Jauer. You would be able to bury yourself under your gold bags." "Shame on me if that could ever determine my choice!"