Though the Hecker brothers were, and ever continued to be, men of the highest business integrity, and though there existed between them a cordial affection, which was intensified to an extraordinary degree in the case of George and Isaac, yet the unfitness of the latter for ordinary trade grew increasingly evident, and to himself painfully so.

The truth is, that his ideas of conducting business would have led to the distribution of profits rather than to their accumulation.
If he could make the bake-house and the shop into a school for the attainment of an ideal that had begun to hover, half-veiled, in the air above him, he saw his way to staying where he was; but not otherwise.
[* I Timothy 6:8.] In the autumn of 1842 there came upon him certain singular intensifications of this disquiet with himself and his surroundings.
In the journal begun the following spring, he so frequently and so explicitly refers to these occurrences, now speaking of them as "dreams which had a great effect upon my character"; and again, specializing and fully describing one, as something not dreamed, but seen when awake, "which left an indelible impression my mind," weaning it at once and for ever from all possibility of natural love and marriage, that the integrity of any narrative of his life would demand some recognition of them.

His own comment, in the diary, will not be without interest and value, both as bearing on much that follows, and as containing all that need be said in explanation of the present reference to such experiences: "April 24, 1843 .-- .

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