ouse at home Barbara busily kept her distaff on the whirl and
whizz, whilst Rettel balanced the house-keeping accounts, or thought
out the preparation of new and hitherto unheard-of dishes, or related
again to the old woman, mingled with a good deal of loud laughter, what
she had learned in confidence from her various gossips in the town.

And the youth Jonathan? He sat at the table with Nanni; and she also
wrote and drew, of course under his guidance. And yet to sit writing
and drawing the whole evening through is a downright tiring piece of
business; hence it was no unfrequent occurrence for Jonathan to draw
some neatly-bound book out of his pocket and read it to pretty,
sensitive Nanni in a low softly-whispering tone.

Through old Eichheimer's influence Jonathan had won the patronage of
the minor canon, who designated Master Wacht a real Verrina. The canon,
Count von Koesel, a man of genius, lived and revelled in Goethe's and
Schiller's works, which were just at that time beginning to rise like
bright streaming meteors, overtopping all others, above the horizon of
the literary sky. He thought, and rightly, that he discerned a similar
tendency in his attorney's young clerk, and took a special delight not
only in lending him the works in question, but in reading them in
common with him, and so helping him to thoroughly digest them.

But Jonathan won his way to the Count's heart in an especial way,
because he expressed a very favourable opinion of the verses which the
Count patched together out of high-sounding phrases in the sweat of his
own brow, and because he was, to the Count's unspeakable satisfaction,
edified and touched by them to the proper pitch. Nevertheless it is a
fact that Jonathan's taste in aesthetic matters was really greatly
improved by his intercourse with the intellectual, though somewhat
euphuistic, Count.

My kind reader now knows what class of books Jonathan used to take out
of his pocket and read to pretty Nanni, and can form a just conception
of the way in which this kind of writings would inevitably excite a
girl mentally organised as Nanni was. "O star of the gloaming eve!"
Would not Nanni's tears flow when her attractive writing-master began
in this low and solemn fashion?

It is a fact of common experience that young people who are in the
habit of singing tender love-duets together very easily put themselves
in the places of the fictitious characters of the song, and come to
look upon t