and forwards among the most august objects of the Holy Roman Empire.  This evening it was impossible to see her, and I lay awake through a very restless night.  The study of yesterday was the next day zealously resumed; and it was not till towards evening that I found it possible to visit my fair one, whom I met again in her usual house-dress.  She smiled when she saw me, but I did not venture to mention any thing before the others.  When the whole company sat quietly together again, she began, and said, “It is unfair that you do not confide to our friend what we have lately resolved upon.”  She then continued to relate, that after our late conversation, in which the discussion was how any one could get on in the world, something was also said of the way in which a woman could enhance the value of her talent and labor, and advantageously employ her time.  The cousin had consequently proposed that she should make an experiment at a milliner’s, who was just then in want of an assistant.  They had, she said, arranged with the woman:  she went there so many hours a day, and was well paid; but she would there be obliged, for propriety’s sake, to conform to a certain dress, which, however, she left behind her every time, as it did not at all suit her other modes of life and employment.  I was indeed set at rest by this declaration; but it did not quite please me to know that the pretty girl was in a public shop, and at a place where the fashionable world found a convenient resort.  But I betrayed nothing, and strove to work off my jealous care in silence.  For this the younger cousin did not allow me a long time, as he once more came forward with a proposal for an occasional poem, told me all the personalities, and at once desired me to prepare myself for the invention and disposition of the work.  He had spoken with me several times already concerning the proper treatment of such a theme; and, as I was voluble in these cases, he readily asked me to explain to him, circumstantially, what is rhetorical in these things, to give him a notion of the matter, and to make use of my own and others’ labors in this kind for examples.  The young man had some brains, but not a trace of a poetical vein; and now he went so much into particulars, and wished to have such an account of every thing, that I gave utterance to the remark, “It seems as if you wanted to encroach upon my trade, and take away my customers!”—­“I will not deny it,” said he, smiling, “as I shall do you no harm by it.  This will only continue to the time when you go to the university, and till then you must allow me still to profit something by your society.”—­“Most cordially,” I replied; and I encouraged him to draw out a plan, to choose a metre according to the character of his subject, and to do whatever else might seem necessary.  He went to work in earnest, but did not succeed.  I was in the end compelled to re-write so much of it, that I could more easily and better have written it all from the beginning myself.  Yet this teaching