“Long time in even scale the battle hung,” until Potts and Wainwright retired from the field as conquerors, in the estimation of themselves and enthusiastic friends. The sun and moon and romantic stars performed their wonted evolutions, and Potts and Wainwright had their salaries increased, and rose to Bishoprics and the giddy alpines of the godly avenues, and we went to the setting sun, and almost beyond the world. On our return from the bleak, and shady, and snowy slopes of the Rocky Mountains, in 1849, we dwelt with Mrs. Mitchell, at the corner of Houston and McDougal streets, whose family consisted of her daughter, two nieces, a sister, and Otto Dressel, a teacher of piano music, whose style was soft, pensive, sacred, and bewitching. We had boarded with Mrs. Mitchell, in Broadway, eight years previous, and in 1841, while going up the dark alley that led to Jackson’s pawnbroker’s shop in Reade street, we met Mrs. Mitchell coming down the lane, who sneezed while we coughed, when we both passed on with crimson cheeks and sly glances of each other. Otto Dressel’s sleeping apartment at Mrs. Mitchell’s in Houston street, in 1849, was next to ours; and many a summer eve, while reclining on our couch, has Otto borne us into the unconscious realms of Morpheus, with his soothing and entrancing music. The pale and rosy and dark-eyed offspring of the mother and departed sister, were ever at his door, and perhaps too often within, or on the music side of his portal. We often heard the thrilling echo of kisses, and the sudden tap of his piano, to drown the reverberation emblems of a lover or libertine. And we often warned the mother and sister of the fatal intimacy between the music serpent, and the pretty virgins of their blood. But they smiled, and said: “O, fy;” and we let the music-teacher have his way, and he kissed and hugged the lovely maidens to his heart’s content. The eldest girl was Julia Mitchell, who drew near one evening while we were seated on the sofa, (with no light save the milky rays of an autumnal moon,) when she said: “Stephen, can you keep a secret?” “Yes.” “Then listen: Otto Dressel, you perceive, is morose and reserved, and dignified at our table, but he is a thorough scamp, and so loquacious when alone in the presence of pretty girls, that his tongue rattles like a rattlesnake; and his music, in the society of spotless virgins, is so alluring, as to enrapture, and bewitch, and deprive them of self-control and consciousness. Almost every evening, the beautiful, and musical, and intellectual daughter of the Rev. Doctor George Potts archly and slyly drops gilded notes on our steps, when Otto, who is watching her arrival from his bedroom window, runs down stairs with the velocity of a deer, and clutches the pale and lovely missives, and bounds up stairs like a bloodhound. Otto is her music-teacher, and he tells me that he reads with her, at her father’s and elsewhere, all the latest English, French and German