"Ah!" sighed Schnapper-Elle, "virtue is worth more than beauty. What use
is my beauty to me? My youth is passing away, and since Schnapper is
gone--anyhow, he had handsome hands--what avails beauty?"

With that she sighed again, and like an echo, all but inaudible, Nose
Star sighed behind her. "Of what avail is your beauty?" cried Don Isaac.
"Oh, Dona Schnapper-Elle, do not sin against the goodness of creative
Nature! Do not scorn her most charming gifts, or she will reap most
terrible revenge. Those blessed, blessing eyes will become glassy balls,
those winsome lips grow flat and unattractive, that chaste and charming
form be changed into an unwieldy barrel of tallow, and the city of
Amsterdam at last rest on a spongy bog." Thus he sketched piece by
piece the appearance of Schnapper-Elle, so that the poor woman was
bewildered, and sought to escape the uncanny compliments of the
cavalier. She was delighted to see Beautiful Sara appear at this
instant, as it gave her an opportunity to inquire whether she had quite
recovered from her swoon. Thereupon she plunged into lively chatter, in
which she fully developed her sham gentility, mingled with real kindness
of heart, and related with more prolixity than discretion the awful
story of how she herself had almost fainted with horror when she, as
innocent and inexperienced as could be, arrived in a canal boat at
Amsterdam, and the rascally porter, who carried her trunk, led her--not
to a respectable hotel, but oh, horrors!--to an infamous brothel! She
could tell what it was the moment she entered, by the brandy-drinking,
and by the immoral sights! And she would, as she said, really have
swooned, if it had not been that during the six weeks she stayed in the
disorderly house she only once ventured to close her eyes.

"I dared not," she added, "on account of my virtue. And all that was
owing to my beauty! But virtue will stay--when good looks pass away."

Don Isaac was on the point of throwing some critical light on the
details of this story when, fortunately, Squinting Aaron Hirschkuh from
Homburg-on-the-Lahn came with a white napkin on his arm, and bitterly
bewailed that the soup was already served, and that the boarders were
seated at table, but that the landlady was missing.

(The conclusion and the chapters which follow are lost, not from any
fault of the author.)

THE LIFE OF FRANZ GRILLPARZER

BY WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD, A.M.

Assistant Professor of German, Ha