ile you
were losing yourself in the boundless prospect, and coming to yourself
again.

Yes, it is so now! How it was in other times, when one could live on in
undisturbed dreaminess, we can hardly imagine. At all times--whether in
the pressure of heavy affliction, when our own life has become a
burden, and the world indifferent, or in exalted feeling, when we are
transported, as it were, out of all actual existence--the newspaper
comes, and demands our attention, and calls to us as if we were to
cooperate everywhere in the various relations of the world.

What has America to do with the young man? and yet he has just read an
account of matters there; the choice of a new President of the Republic
was exciting all minds in the New World, and the name of a man who was
a pattern of uprightness and worldwide views, Abraham Lincoln, seemed
to penetrate everywhere, and to bring with it a great crisis in the
history of humanity. Deeply interested, he looked up smiling, for he
remembered that the Frenchwoman had said that an American girl could
alone console the homesick child, and that she had also composed the
play for the festival. Here a child plays with sacred stories, whilst
all is in commotion in her Fatherland. The thoughts of the young man
were again in the convent, and with the wonderful apparition.

Just as he was laying down the paper, his eye fell upon an
advertisement. He knit his brows, looked around, and read again; then
asking permission to keep the paper, he carried it with him to his
chamber. "A handsome man," said the guests, after he had gone;
"evidently a young widower, who wishes to find distraction from his
grief in a Rhine-journey; he wears a weed on his hat.'"

CHAPTER II.

"UP THE RIVER."

"Name: Eric Dournay. Title: Doctor of Philosophy, late Army-Captain.
Place of departure: name of a small University city. Destination: ----
Object of Journey: ----"

Such was the entry made by the young man in the register of the inn
early the next morning; and he now first noticed written above his
name, "Justice Vogt, Lady, nee Landen, and Daughter, from"--a small
town on the Upper Rhine. That was then the mottled gentleman of
yesterday with the two ladies.

Eric, for so we shall hereafter call him, carrying his small valise,
went down to the steamboat-landing. The morning was fresh and bright,
life and song everywhere, and only one little