"Puh-h-h!" thought Bagger, seating himself with intense relief, "I have come out of it somewhat decently after all. The deuce take me before I again express a sentimentality." How Counsellor Bagger that night could have fallen asleep, between memory, or longing and discontent, is difficult to tell, had he not on his arrival home found a package of papers, an interesting theft case. He sat down instantly to read, and day dawned ere they were finished. His last thought, before his eyelids closed, was,--Two years in the House of Correction. III. A month later, toward the close of September, two ladies, twenty or twenty-two years of age, were walking in a garden about ten miles from Copenhagen. Although the walks were quite wide, impediments in them made it difficult for the ladies to go side by side. The autumn showed itself uneven and jagged. The currant and gooseberry boughs, that earlier hung in soft arches, now projected stiffly forth, catching in the ladies' dresses; branches from plum and apple trees hung bare and broken, and required attention above also. One of the ladies apparently was at home there: this was evident partly from her dress, which, although elegant, was domestic, and partly by her taking the lead and paying honor, by drawing boughs and branches aside, holding them until the other lady, who was more showily dressed, had slipped past. On account of the hindrances of the walk there were none of those easy, subdued, familiar conversations, which otherwise so naturally arise when young ladies, acquaintances, or "friends," visit each other, and from the house slip out alone into garden or wood. An attentive observer meanwhile, by scrutinizing the physiognomy of both, would, perhaps, have come to the conclusion, that even if these two had been together on the most unobstructed road, no confidence would have arisen between them, and would have suspected the hostess of trying to atone for her lack of interest, by being polite and careful. She was not strikingly handsome, but possessed of a fine nature, which manifested itself in the whole figure, and perhaps, especially, in the uncommonly well-formed nose; yet it was by peering into her eyes that one first obtained the idea of a womanhood somewhat superior to the generality of her sex. Their expression was not to be caught at once: they told of both meditation and resolve, and hinted at irony or badinage, which works so queerly when it comes from deep ground. The other lady was "burgherly-genteel," a handsome, cultivated girl, had certainly also some soul, but yet was far less busy with a world in her own heart than with the world of fashion. It was about the world, the world of Copenhagen, that Miss Brandt at this moment was giving Miss Hjelm an account, interrupted by the boughs and branches, and although Miss Hjelm was not, nun-like, indifferent either to fashions or incidents in high life, the manner in which Miss Brandt unmistakably laid her soul