etested companion glanced angrily
at me, and whispered in hurried words--"And that can you endure? What
then flows instead of blood in your veins?" He scratched with a
hasty movement a slight wound in my hand, blood flowed, and he
continued--"Actually red blood!--So sign then!" I had the parchment
and the pen in my hand.

CHAPTER VII

My wish, dear Chamisso, is merely to submit myself to thy judgment,
not to endeavor to bias it. I have long passed the severest sentence
on myself, for I have nourished the tormenting worm in my heart. It
hovered during this solemn moment of my life incessantly before my
soul, and I could only lift my eyes to it with a doubting glance, with
humility and contrition. Dear friend, he who in levity only sets his
foot out of the right road, is unawares conducted into other paths,
which draw him downward and ever downward; he then sees in vain the
guiding stars glitter in heaven; there remains to him no choice;
he must descend unpausingly the declivity and become a voluntary
sacrifice to Nemesis. After the hasty false step which had laid the
curse upon me, I had, sinning through love, forced myself into the
fortunes of another being, and what remained for me but that, where
I had sowed destruction, where speedy salvation was demanded of me, I
should blindly rush forward to the rescue?--for the last hour struck!
Think not so meanly of me, my Adelbert, as to imagine that I should
have regarded any price that was demanded as too high, that I should
have begrudged anything that was mine even more than my gold. No,
Adelbert! but my soul was possessed with the most unconquerable
hatred of this mysterious sneaker along crooked paths. I might do him
injustice, but every degree of association with him revolted me. And
here stepped forth, as so frequently in my life, and as in general
so often in the history of the world, an event instead of an action.
Since then I have achieved reconciliation with myself. I have learned,
in the first place, to reverence necessity; and what is more than the
action performed, the event accomplished--her propriety. Then I have
learned to venerate this necessity as a wise Providence, which lives
through that great collective machine in which we officiate simply as
cooeperating, impelling, and impelled wheels. What shall be, must be;
what should be, happened, and not without that Providence, which I
ultimately learned to reverence in my own fate and in the fate of