ept coweringly across the lawn, and,
drawing nigh the door, stood and whined plaintively. After a brief pause
the door opened, the animal stole in; the door then closed with a bang,
and all was still as before. I turned back towards the town with a heavy
heart; a gloomy dread of those I was to be associated with on the morrow
was over me, and I went to the inn and locked myself into my room, and
fell upon my bed with a sense of desolation that found vent at last in a
torrent of tears.

As I look back on the night that followed, it seems to me one of the
saddest passages of my life. If I fell asleep, it was to dream of the
past, with all its exciting pleasures and delights, and then, awaking
suddenly, I found myself in this wretched, poverty-stricken room,
where every object spoke of misery, and recalled me to the thought of a
condition as ignoble and as lowly.

I remember well how I longed for day-dawn, that I might get up and
wander along the shore, and taste the fresh breeze, and hear the plash
of the sea, and seek in that greater, wider, and more beautiful world
of nature a peace that my own despairing thoughts would not suffer me
to enjoy. And, at the first gleam of light, I did steal down, and issue
forth, to walk for hours along the bay in a sort of enchantment from
the beauty of the scene, that filled me at last with a sense of almost
happiness. I thought of Pauline, too, and wondered would _she_ partake
of the delight this lovely spot imparted to _me?_ Would _she_ see these
leafy woods, that bold mountain, that crystal sea, with its glittering
sands many a fathom deep, as I saw them? And if so, what a stimulus to
labor and grow rich was in the thought.

In pleasant reveries, that dashed the future with much that had
delighted me in the past, the hours rolled on till it was time to
present myself at Herr Oppovich's. Armed with my letter of introduction,
I soon found myself at the door of a large warehouse, over which his
name stood in big letters. A narrow wooden stair ascended steeply from
the entrance to a long low room, in which fully twenty clerks were
busily engaged at their desks. At the end of this, in a smaller room,
I was told Herr Ignaz--for he was always so called--held his private
office.

Before I was well conscious of it, I was standing in this room before a
short, thick-set old man, with heavy eyebrows and beard, and whose long
coat of coarse cloth reached to his feet.

He sat and examined me