"Ah! my friend," said he with excitement, "don't trust the faith of a
woman." And then rising from his seat he said, "The Backwoods
Philosopher warns you. I pray you give good heed. I do not know Julia.
She is my niece. It ill becomes me to doubt her sincerity. But I know
whose daughter she is. I pray you give good heed, my Teutonic friend. _I
know whose daughter she is_!

"I do not talk much. But you have arrived at a critical point--a point
of turning. Out of his own life, out of his own sorrow, the Backwoods
Philosopher warns you. I am at peace now. But look at me. Do you not see
the marks of the ravages of a great storm? A sort of a qualified
happiness I have in philosophy. But what I might have been if the
storm had not torn me to pieces in my youth--what I might have been,
that I am not. I pray you never trust in a woman's keeping the happiness
of your life!"

[Illustration: "LOOK AT ME."]

Here Andrew slipped his arm through Wehle's, and began to promenade with
him in the large apartment up and down an alley, dimly lighted by a
candle, between solid phalanxes of books.

"I pray you give good heed," he said, resuming. "I was always eccentric.
People thought I was either a genius or fool. Perhaps I was much of
both. But this is a digression. I did not pay any attention to women. I
shunned them. I said that to be a great author and a philosophical
thinker, one must not be a man of society. I never went to a
wood-chopping, to an apple-peeling, to a corn-shucking, to a
barn-raising, nor indeed to any of our rustic feasts. I suppose this