From that time forth the box we have described made its appearance every Christmas evening, accompanied by a few cordial lines, to which Wohlfart responded in a masterpiece of caligraphy, expressing his surprise at the unexpected arrival, and wishing a happy new year to the firm.

The old gentleman persisted, even to his wife, in treating this Christmas box as a mere accident, a trifle, a whim of some clerk in the house of T.O.Schroeter, and yearly protested against the expectation of its arrival, by which the good woman's household purchases were more or less influenced.

But its arrival was, in reality, of the utmost importance in his eyes; and that, not for the sake of the actual coffee and sugar themselves, but of the poetry of this connecting link between him and the life of a perfect stranger.

He carefully tied up all the letters of the firm, together with three love-letters from his wife.

He became a connoisseur in colonial produce, an oracle in coffee, whose decision was much deferred to by the Ostrau shopkeepers.