The Clerk of the Privy Chancery went carefully and considerately up to the table, looked at the caskets with much minuteness of observation, read the inscriptions on them one after another. Soon he found himself irresistibly attracted by the beautiful characters of foreign languages so charmingly intertwined on the cover of the silver casket.
"Good heavens!" he cried, "what beautiful lettering, with what skill those Arabic characters are brought in amongst the Roman letters, and 'Who chooseth me doth gain more than he hopes.' Now have I gone on cherishing the slightest hope that Miss Albertine would be so gracious as to honour me with her hand? wasn't I going to throw myself into the basin? Evidently here is comfort, here is good fortune. Commissionsrath! Miss Albertine! I choose the silver one."
Albertine rose and handed him a little key, with which he opened the casket. Great was his consternation to find, not Albertine's portrait, but a little book bound in parchment, which, when he opened it, appeared to consist of blank white pages. Beside it lay a little scrap of paper, with the words--
"Thy choice was, in a way, amiss,
But those few words do tell thee this--
What thou hast won will never alter,
To use it thou needs't never falter.
What 'tis as yet thou dost not see,
An endless source of joy 'twill be.
Ignorantiam 'twill enlighten,