find time to thank you for your charming letter, and send you my professional blessing on your becoming a member of the craft. "This I do now in full, Fance, and may you have much happiness in giving pleasure to others; may you taste only the sweets, and none of the bitternesses of authorship; may the public pelt you with roses, and never with sand; and may the printer's ink never draw black lines upon your soul—all of which I devoutly believe will be the case; so what is the use of my wishing it? But it is the custom of the guild, so take my blessing under my hand and seal. The journeyman tailor, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy."
The greatest joys of Fanny Hensel's life, apart from her music and her pride in the successes of her husband and brother, were probably her two journeys to Italy, of which a full account is given in her delightful diary. Yet her home life was most beautiful and most happy, and she seemed continually learning to appreciate it more. One of the last entries in her diary bears touching witness to this fact:
"Yesterday," she wrote, "the first breath of spring was in the air. It has been a long winter, with much frost and snow, universal dearth and distress; indeed, a winter full of suffering. What have we done to deserve being among the few happy ones in the world? My inmost heart is at any rate full of thankfulness, and when in the morning, after breakfasting with Wilhelm, we each go to our own work with a pleasant day to look back upon and another to look forward to, I am quite overcome with my own happiness."
On the afternoon of May 14, 1847, while sitting at the piano playing the accompaniment for her little choir which was rehearsing for the performance of the next Sunday, she was suddenly seized with mortal illness. Her hands fell at her sides; she could neither speak nor
