and charm to the most
trifling domestic pleasures was wanting.

"But we had not yet reached the end of our sorrows; our son, too, was
to be taken from us. He studied medicine---a quiet, steady, and, to all
appearances, a somewhat phlegmatic man; but he had an exceptionally
keen sense of honor. When his sister did not return, this and that
began to be gossiped about her. The slightest allusion, often a
perfectly innocent speech, would throw him into a state of furious
anger. It was some remark of this sort that had as its sequel a duel
between him and his best friend. They bore the last joy of our life,
bathed in bloody back into our wretched home.

"And now the floodgates were opened. It was all over with our model
household. It came out why our daughter had been driven to misery and
our son to death. Our friends could not help assuming a certain air of
pity toward us, that broke my wife's heart and drove me from the city.
I went to North Germany, and there I buried my wife a year later. Soon
after I gave up painting. I looked upon engraving, with all its
drudgery, as an instrument of chastisement--as a mode of daily forcing
down my pride. My dishonored name had become hateful to me, and I had
laid it aside when I left Bavaria, But I did not neglect to have an
appeal to my outcast child inserted in all the newspapers, begging her
to return to her solitary father, to forgive him, and to help him bear
his remaining years of life.

"No answer ever came, although I continued to have the notice inserted
for many years.

"At last I became thoroughly convinced that she was no longer in this
world; and no sooner did this belief, which it had taken ten years to
beat into my head, become a settled conviction, than a singular
transformation took place in me. I grew calm again, after all my
wretched experiences, and at peace with myself; there were times when I
had difficulty in recognizing in my present self the man whose guilt
and foolishness had worked so much misery. I succeeded so well in
outliving my old nature, in working a complete regeneration of my inner
man, that I actually felt something like curiosity to see the city in
which my predecessor had suffered so much sorrow and shame.

"And so, one day, I came back to Munich, though I scarcely knew it
again, for everything at whose birth I had assisted was now completed,
and besides a new world had sprung up. Nor did the old city recognize
me either. I had grown a whi