head sadly, and said:  Honor forbade him to do so.  When she asked him about her father, his words poured forth like a swiftly flowing stream:  The bailiff was an angel; there never was, and never would be such a man again on the face of the earth; his father was good and kind, but hers was the prince of fathers.  When she asked after Miss Fidelia, he said:  He never troubled himself about women, and was utterly indifferent to almost all of them; but once when, as ill luck would have it, she asked him about Frank, his eyes flashed and he shouted “Ha!” once or twice with a sort of snort, laughed scornfully, caught hold of her hand, slipped a bit of paper into it, and plunged head foremost into the rye-field, where he was soon lost to sight.  When she opened the paper she found that it contained the following effusion: 

  TO HER.

  “When with tender Silvery light
   Luna peeps the clouds between,
   And ’spite of dark disastrous night
   The radiant sun is also seen
   When the wavelets murmuring flow
   When oak and ivy clinging grow,
   Then, O then, in that witching hour
   Let us meet in my lady’s bow’r.

“Where’er thy joyous step doth go Love waits upon thee ever, The spring-flow’rs in my hat do show I’ll cease to love thee never.  When thou’rt gone from out my sight Vanished is my sole delight, Alas! Thou ne’er canst understand What I’ve suffered at thy hand.

“My vengeance dire! will fall on him, The foe who has hurt me sore, Hurt me! who writes this poem here; Revenge!! I’ll seek for evermore.

                                            FREDERIC TRIDDELFITZ.
  Puempelhagen, July 3d, 1842.”

The first time that Louisa read this effusion she could make nothing of it, when she had read it twice she did not understand it a bit better, and after the third reading she was as far from comprehending it as she had been at first; that is to say, she could not make out who it was on whom the unhappy poet wished to be revenged.  She was not so stupid as not to know that the “Her” was intended for herself.

She would have liked to have been able to think that the whole affair was only a silly joke, but when she remembered Fred’s odd manner she was obliged to confess that it was anything but a joke, and so she determined to keep as much as possible out of his way.  She was such a tender-hearted little creature that she was full of compassion for Fred’s sufferings.  Now pity is a bridge that often leads to the beautiful meadows stretched on the other side of it full of rose-bushes and jasmine-hedges, which are as attractive to a maiden of seventeen as cherries to a bird, and who knows whether Louisa might not have been induced to wander in those pleasant groves, had she not been restrained by the thought of Fred riding amongst the roses on the old sorrel-horse, holding