the other hand, the carrying out of this resolve, in view of the
financial inconvenience it entailed, produced strange
complications, the nature of which was only revealed to me later,
when startling developments divulged the real moral character of
the manager Holtei. For the present I had to let people think
that I was jealous of my wife. I bore patiently with the general
belief that I had good reasons to be so, and rejoiced meanwhile
at the restoration of our peaceful married life, and especially
at the sight of our humble home, which we made as comfortable as
our means would allow, and in the keeping of which Minna's
domestic talents came strongly to the fore. As we were still
childless, and were obliged as a rule to enlist the help of a dog
in order to give life to the domestic hearth, we once lighted
upon the eccentric idea of trying our luck with a young wolf
which was brought into the house as a tiny cub. When we found,
however, that this experiment did not increase the comfort of our
home life, we gave him up after he had been with us a few weeks.
We fared better with sister Amalie; for she, with her good-nature
and simple homely ways, did much to make up for the absence of
children for a time. The two sisters, neither of whom had had any
real education, often returned playfully to the ways of their
childhood. When they sang children's duets, Minna, though she had
had no musical training, always managed very cleverly to sing
seconds, and afterwards, as we sat at our evening meal, eating
Russian salad, salt salmon from the Dwina, or fresh Russian
caviare, we were all three very cheerful and happy far away in
our northern home.

Amalie's beautiful voice and real vocal talent at first won for
her a very favourable reception with the public, a fact which did