oon. My
hated evil genius fixed his eyes angrily on me, and whispered in these
rapid words, "Can you bear _that_ too? What runs in your veins instead
of blood?" With a swift motion he made a slight wound in my hand--blood
gushed forth: he cried, "Red blood, truly! sign." The parchment and the
pen were in my hand.

CHAPTER VII.

I shall expose myself, dear Chamisso, to your criticism, and not seek to
elude it. I have long visited myself with the heaviest judgment, for I
have fed the devouring worm in my heart. This terrible moment of my
existence is everlastingly present to my soul; and I can contemplate it
only in a doubting glance, with humility and contrition. My friend, he
who carelessly takes a step out of the straight path, is imperceptibly
impelled into another course, in which he will be deluded farther and
farther astray. For him in vain the pole-star twinkles in the heavens;
there is no choice for him; he must slide down the declivity, and offer
himself up to Nemesis. After the false and precipitate step which had
brought down the curse upon me, I had daringly thrust myself upon the
fate of another being. What now remained, but where I had sowed
perdition, and prompt salvation was urgent--again blindly to rush forward
to save?--for the last knell had tolled. Do not think so basely of me,
my Chamisso, as to imagine that I should have thought any price too dear,
or should have been more sparing with anything I possessed than with my
gold? No! but my soul was filled with unconquerable hatred towards this
mysterious sneaker in crooked paths. Perhaps I might be unjust to him,
yet my mind revolted against all communication with him. But here, as
often in my life, and generally in the history of the world, an accident
rather than an intention, determined the issue. Afterwards I became
reconciled to myself. I learnt, in the first place, to respect
necessity, and those accidents which are yet more the result of necessity
than any will of our own. Then was I also taught to obey this necessity,
as a wise arrangement of Providence, which sets all this machinery in
action, in which we only co-operate by moving and setting other wheels in
motion. What must be, will happen; what should have been, was; and not
without the intervention of that Providence, which I at last learnt to
reverence in my fate, and in the fate of her who controlled mine.

I know not if I should ascribe it to the strain of my