When she asked after Miss Fidelia, he said: He never troubled
himself about women, and was utterly indifferent to _almost_ all of
them; but once when, as ill luck would have it, she asked him about
Frank, his eyes flashed and he shouted "Ha!" once or twice with a sort
of snort, laughed scornfully, caught hold of her hand, slipped a bit of
paper into it, and plunged head foremost into the rye-field, where he
was soon lost to sight. When she opened the paper she found that it
contained the following effusion:
TO HER.
"When with tender Silvery light
Luna peeps the clouds between,
And 'spite of dark disastrous night
The radiant sun is also seen
When the wavelets murmuring flow
When oak and ivy clinging grow,
Then, O then, in that witching hour
Let us meet _in my_ lady's bow'r.
"Where'er thy joyous step doth go
Love waits upon thee ever,
The spring-flow'rs in my hat do show
I'll cease to love thee never.
When thou'rt gone from out my sight
Vanished is my sole delight,
_Alas!_ Thou ne'er canst understand
What I've suffered at thy hand.
"My _vengeance_ dire! will fall on him,
The foe who has hurt me sore,
Hurt _me!_ who writes this poem here;
_Revenge!!_ I'll seek for evermore.
FREDERIC TRIDDELFITZ.
_Puempelhagen, July 3d, 1842._"
The first time that Louisa read this effusion she could make nothing of
it, when she had read it twice she did not understand it a bit better,
and after the third reading she was as far from comprehending it as she
had been at first; that is to say, she could not make out who it was on
whom the unhappy poet wished to be revenged.
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