be with you. I have new
plans, and I long to lay down all my feelings and all my thoughts
on your true breast. My Louise! I will no longer wait and seek.
Since fortune perpetually runs out of my way, I will now take a
leap and catch it, and in so doing trust in heaven, in you, and
lastly also--in myself. But you must give me your hand. If you
will do that, beloved, I shall soon be much happier than now, and
eternally,

"Your tenderly devoted, "J. Jacobi."

The other letter was from an unknown hand--evidently a woman's hand, and
was as follows:

"Do not hate me, although I have stood in the way of your happiness. Do
not hate me--for I bless you and the noble man with whom you have united
your fate. He is my benefactor, and the benefactor of my husband and my
children. Oh, these children whose future he has made sure, they will
now call on heaven to give a double measure of happiness to him and you
for that which he has so nobly renounced. The object of my writing is to
obtain your forgiveness, and to pour forth the feelings of a grateful
heart to those who can best reward my benefactor. Will you be pleased on
this account to listen to the short, but uninteresting relation of a
condition, which, at the same time, is as common as it is mournful?

"Perhaps Mr. Jacobi may at some time or other have mentioned my husband
to you. He was for several years Jacobi's teacher, and each was much
attached to the other. My husband held the office of schoolmaster in W.,
with honour, for twenty years. His small income, misfortunes which befel
us, a quick succession of children, made our condition more oppressive
from year to year, and increased the debt which from the very time when
we settled down first we were obliged to incur. My husband sought after
a pastoral cure, but he could have recourse to none of those arts which
are now so almost universally helpful, and which often conduct the
hunter after fortune, and the mean-spirited, rather than the deserving,
to the gaol of their wishes; he was too simple for that, too modest, and
perhaps also too proud.

"During the long course of years he had seen his just hopes deceived,
and from year to year the condition of his family become more and more
melancholy. Sickness had diminished his ability to work, and the fear of
not being able to pay his debts gnawed into his health, which was not
strong, and the prospect--of his nine unp