flames.

_Le souper est servi_, the evening is gone, and I have done nothing
but chat with you and smoke: is that not becoming employment for the
dike-captain? Why not?

A mysterious letter from ---- lies before me. He writes in a tone new
for him; admits that he perceives that he did many a wrong to his first
wife; did not always rightly guide and bear with her weakness; was no
prop to the "child," and believes himself absolved by this severe
castigation. _Qu'est-ce qu'il me chante_? Has the letter undergone
transformation in the Christian climate of Reinfeld, or did it leave the
hand of this once shallow buffoon in its present form? He asserts,
moreover, that he lives in a never dreamed of happiness with his present
wife, whose acquaintance he made a week before the engagement, and whom
he married six weeks after the same event: a happiness which his first
marriage has taught him rightly to prize. Do you know the story of the
French tiler who falls from the roof, and, in passing the second story,
cries out, "_Ça va bien, pourvu que ça dure_?" Think, only, if we had
been betrothed on the 12th of October '44, and, on November 23d, had
married: What anxiety for mamma!

The English poems of mortal misery trouble me no more now; that was of
old, when I looked out into nothing--cold and stiff, snow-drifts in my
heart. Now a black cat plays with it in the sunshine, as though with a
rolling skein, and I like to see its rolling. I will give you, at the
end of this letter, a few more verses belonging to that period, of
which fragmentary copies are still preserved, as I see, in my
portfolio. You may allow me to read them still; they harm me no more.
_Thine eyes have still (and will always have) a charm for me_.[12]