=The Mummy-Coffin.=--Seven years of marriage had passed; they had not tended their lamp, but it smoked so that everything in the beautiful home was blackened. Now each sits in their own comer of the dwelling, because they cannot look each other in the eyes. They lament each other as dead, and miss each other like lost children. Then he opens a drawer and takes out a little box. A scent of fresh roses streams into the room, although it comes from dry rose-leaves pressed between sheets of paper. Those are her letters which she wrote during her engagement seven years ago. How beautiful it all is: the paper with its fine, still unbleached lavender tint and gold borders, just like the wedding-breakfast glasses; the envelopes carefully folded like the embroidered cushion-cover of the cradle; the letters themselves in beautiful rows of gentle words from beautiful lips which smile gracefully. Beauty and love in thoughts and feelings--there he had found her again in the little box embalmed with rose-leaves and violets. But now she is dead, and he weeps! And at the other end of the house she sits over her little mummy-coffin and speaks with her beloved dead, and weeps. Lost for ever! For ever! =In the Attic.=--Only three years had passed since his marriage, and now the storm had carried away all--his wife and child. He had occasion to go up to the attic to fetch something which had been put away there. So he came up to this room, where it always rustled and creaked, and cats slunk about, and the viscera of the house, so to speak, were visible in beams and chimney, where there were rust and soot and hanging cobwebs. He unfastened the padlock. There lay all the flotsam and jetsam after the wreck. It was too late to turn back, and he remained. There was the canopy of their marriage-bed, with green silk and gilt-brass ornaments. There was the cradle of the little one, and the six milk-bottles which the mother always used to wash with her small hands in the ice-cold water; all the flower-vases and glasses which came into the house on the wedding evening, when the table was laid in the hall. There stood the basket once filled with roses, which she had received on her engagement, which had afterwards become a work-basket. There were withered bouquets, laurel-wreaths, and even books, presents from him at Christmas and on birthdays, with beautiful inscriptions.... But there were also prehistoric articles: pieces of furniture belonging to her girlhood which she had brought into the new home--a Japanese umbrella adorned with chrysanthemums and golden pheasants, a small carpet, a flower-stand.... But why did all these relics lie here in the dust and soot, and not downstairs with him who cherished those memories? Was it that he did not dare to see them every day, or did not wish to?