One day, when I was watching young Stadl at the gambling-table in Wiesbaden, I thought he was rather like the poor servant-girl.  I had taken coffee with him and Weisheimer in the Kur garden, and we had enjoyed one another’s company, when Stadl disappeared for a time.  Weisheimer led me to the gambling-table to find him.  Seldom have I witnessed a more horrible change of expression than that now stamped on the man who was a prey to the gambling mania.  As a demon had possessed poor Lieschen, so now a demon possessed this man.  As folk say, the devils ’pursued their evil lusts in him.’  No appeal, no humiliating admonitions could prevail upon the man tortured by his losses in the game to summon up his moral powers.  As I remembered my own experiences of the gambling passion, to which I had succumbed for a time when I was a youth, I spoke to young Weisheimer on the subject, and offered to show him how I was not afraid to make a stake on pure chance, but that I had no belief in my luck.  When a new round of roulette began, I said to him in a voice of quiet certainty, ‘Number 11 will win’; and it did.  I added fuel to the fire of his astonishment at this stroke of good luck by predicting Number 27 for the next round.  Certainly I remember being overcome by a spell as I spoke, and my number was in fact again victorious.  My young friend was now in a state of such astonishment, that he vehemently urged me to stake something on the numbers which I foretold.  Again I cannot but call to mind the curious, quiet feeling of being spellbound which possessed me as I said, ’As soon as I introduce my own personal interests into the game, my gift of prophecy will disappear at once.’  I then drew him away from the gambling-table, and we took our way back to Biebrich in a fine sunset.

I now came into very painful relations with poor Friederike Meyer.  She wrote and told me of her recovery and requested me to visit her, because she felt it her duty to apologise to me for the trouble in which she had involved me.  As the short drive to Frankfort often helped to entertain me and distract my thoughts, I gladly fulfilled her wishes, and found her in a state of convalescence but still weak, and obviously preoccupied with the effort to fortify my mind against all disagreeable surmises about herself.  She said that Herr von Guaita was like an anxious, almost hypersensitive father to her.  She told me that she was very young when she left her family, and that with her sister Luise in particular she had severed all connection.  She had thus come quite friendless to Frankfort, where the chance protection of Herr von Guaita, a man of mature age, had been very welcome to her.  Unfortunately she had to suffer much that was painful under this arrangement, for she was most bitterly persecuted, chiefly on the score of her reputation, by her patron’s family, who feared he might want to marry her.  As she told me this, I could not refrain from drawing her attention to some of the consequences of the antagonism