Slowly, lingeringly, Harry approached his tutor, and plucked him by the sleeve.
Herr Schmied looked around.
"Must you really go away, Herr Schmied?" the boy asked, in distress.
"Yes," the tutor replied, very gravely.
Harry bit his lip, seemed undecided what to do or say, and finally, leaning his head a little on one side, asked, caressingly, "Even if I beg your pardon?"
Herr Schmied smiled, surprised and touched. He took the boy's hand in his, and said, sadly, "Even then, Harry. Yet I am sorry, for I was beginning to be very fond of you."
The tears were in Harry's eyes, but he evidently felt that no entreaty would be of any avail.
In fact, the next morning Herr Schmied took his departure. A few days afterwards, however, Harry received a letter from him with a foreign post-mark. He had written four long pages to his former pupil. Harry flushed with pride and joy as he read it, and answered it that very evening.
Herr Schmied is now Professor of Modern History in a foreign university, his name is well known, and he is held in high honour. He still corresponds with Harry, whose next tutor was a French abbé. The cause of the abbé's dismissal I have forgotten; indeed, I remember only one more among the numerous preceptors, and he was the last,--a German from Bohemia, called Ewald Finke.
His name was not really Ewald, but Michael, but he called himself Ewald because he liked it better. He had studied abroad, which always impressed us favourably, and, as Uncle Karl was told, he had already won some reputation in Leipsic by his literary efforts. He was looking for a situation as tutor merely that he might have some rest from intellectual labours that had been excessive. "Moreover," his letter of recommendation from a well-known professor went on to say, "the Herr Baron will not be slow to discover that he is here brought into contact with a rarely-gifted nature, one of those in intercourse with whom allowance must be made for certain peculiarities which at first may prove rather annoying." Uncle Karl instantly wrote, in reply, that "annoying peculiarities" were of no consequence,--that he would accord unlimited credit in the matter of allowance to the new tutor. In fact, he took such an interest in the genius thus offered him that he prolonged his stay in Komaritz to two weeks, instead of departing at the end of three days, as he had at first intended, solely in expectation of the new tutor.