the best, but every drop of blood shed that
night, threw back German liberty months, years.
The reaction came, certain as the cold stage
in fever that follows the hot. The rich men
trembling at the mob confounded reform with
destruction, and put down the riot. The leading
revolutionists fled, and among them
Krumpholtz— aided, let me mention for the sake of
humanity, by some Napoleons secretly
transmitted to him by the faithless Fräulein.

Safe out of Scylla, where should the poor
little exile fall, but plump into Charybdis. Safe
from the whirlpool of revolution, Krumpholtz
fell into love. The tender grey-eyed daughter of
his landlady in Queen Anne-street, Soho, pitied
him, until pity turned to love. The little tender
German heart, pining to love something, home
and country lost, returned the affection that the
bony dusty bailiff-faced mother could not check
or hinder.

But even this reciprocated love proved
unlucky to the ill-starred man. Mrs. MacCash
finding her lodger devotedly attached to her
daughter, and at the same time very intermittent
in his financial arrangements, and being
herself a " helpless widow," as she pleaded, determined
to make a serf and drudge of the too
willing lover. Krumpholtz, was doomed, like
Ferdinand, to toil basely for his Miranda. He
was sent out for milk, he got up the coals, he
diplomatised with creditors, he negotiated with
lodgers, he wrote letters, he ran errands. His
only consolations were his love and his violin,
and even on the last-named instrument he was
compelled to play nightly, psalm tunes of the
dismalest kind for his bony tyrant of a landlady,
who was a Primitive Methodist of the
severest tenets.

Yet this penal and degrading life the brave-
hearted little man bore with Christian degradation
rather than run into debt or desert the
girl he loved. Yes! He bore it all without a
murmur, and surrendered every farthing he
earned to that dusty old Semiramis, Mrs. MacCash.

In this dismal atmosphere the little exile
solaced by love and the stuggle of duty, spent
three happy years. At the end of that time
Fate dealt him her most cruel blow. Pretty
little tender-eyed Maggy MacCash caught a low
typhoid fever, and died, pressing her lover's
hand.

Now the clouds darkened, and everything
went wrong. His two schools gave him warning.
The master of the second, with shrugs
and rubbings of his hands, expressed his deep
regret over a glass of sherry. Mr. Krumpholtz
was a most careful and excellent master— there
was but one objection to him— that was " his
size." It seemed a trifling, he might almost say
a ridiculous objection, but it was an insurmountable one.
The boys did not respect him, they
made fun of him, despised his commands, drew
his caricature on the playground walls, made
snow dwarfs to ridicule him, boldly set him at
defiance. All this was true. One brave lad alone
had the courage to respect him and to defend him
from insult; on the sad day when, with tears in
his eyes, the little writing-master, humbly and
affectionately, amid derisive cheers, took leave
of his pupils, that brave lad (afterwards a great
man in India) followed him to the school bounds
and pressed him kindly by the hand.

But these misfortunes might all have been
borne — for there was still the greengrocer's
family at the corner of the street, and there was
still the baker's daughter over the way, to give
writing lessons to— had not a trial still more
terrible to a sensitive man fallen on his unhappy
head.

Knowing his poverty the spies who infest
London began to ply Krumpholtz with temptations.
They intercepted him at the Cafe de la
Cagmaggerie, and drew him slowly into their
toils. They offered him a safe passage home,
money, employment, what not, if he would only
betray a few of the secrets of his revolutionary
friends in London; if he would merely attend
the German singing clubs, and report now and
then what he heard. They wanted very little,
and would pay very well for it. Or, he might
leave his friends, and go and mix among the
French Red Republicans, the Orsini men. The
reward should still be the same.

At first, Krumpholtz, proud little man, of the
most spotless and sensitive honour, turned from
these wretches as he would have done from Apolyon.
Gradually, as poverty pinched him harder
and harder with her paralysing fingers, he felt,
and shuddered to feel, that he began, to listen
to their advances. He fell on his knees by his
miserable bedside, and prayed God to keep such
temptations from his mind. He felt stronger
as he prayed, but next day, he felt again
that he wavered. The toils were narrowing
round the poor man; one day when he met me
in the street he told me how he dreaded lest
poverty should tempt him to become a spy.

That very night, as I afterwards heard, he
went home to his lodgings, and was warned that
he must leave on the morrow. Mrs. MacCash,
tired of solitude, had married a tall red-faced
coarse fellow of a milkman, who had at once
determined to oust his unprofitable lodger.
The dirty little slut who opened the door that
night to the unfortunate Herr Krumpholtz, afterwards
remembered that he asked in a low and
choked voice for his bedroom candle, and that he
sighed as he tapped faintly at the front parlour
door, and wished Mr. and Mrs. MacCash " good
night." Nothing more was thought of the little
German until eleven o'clock next day, when Mr.
MacCash, going up to his lodger's bedroom to
know at what time he intended to clear out,
obtained no reply to his repeated knocking but
a faint groan twice repeated. One bump of the
brawny milkman's shoulder to the door, and it
fell in splinters. He rushed into the room; and
there, pale, shrunk, and fainting, on a bed
soaked with blood, lay the poor little writing-
master. One hand still clutched the razor, in
the other was a letter in pencil:

DEAR MRS. MACCASH, Forgive me for putting
an end to my wretched life in your house. I could