10. CYCLE.

The farther the island receded, so much the more did the magic-smoke around the nocturnal apparition sink to the ground, and leave behind in full view merely an inexplicable juggler. Now for the first time he revealed the ghost-story to his companions. Schoppe and Augusti shook their heads thoughtfully, but each thought of something different;—the Librarian sought a physical solution of the acoustic and optical illusion; the Lector sought a political one: he could not at all comprehend what the stage-manager of this grave-digger's scene specially meant by it all.

This one comfort the Librarian held to, that Alban on his birthday was directed to pay a visit to the heart without a breast, which visit he could just forego, and so make the seer out to be a myops and a liar. "Would to Heaven," said he, "an Ezekiel would just prophesy to me that I should bring him to the gallows! I would not do it for any money, but I would, without mercy, make it fatal, not to his neck, but to his credit and his brains." To his incredulous father, also, Albano wrote, during the journey, not without a blush, the incredible history; for he had too few years over his head, and too much energy and daring, to love reserve in himself or others. Only weak, caterpillar- and hedgehog-like souls curl and crumple up into themselves at every touch: under the free brain beats gladly a free heart.

At last, when sunny mountains and shady forests enough, like days and nights that have been lived through, had been left behind them, they approached the goal of their long riding-ground, full of countries, and now the Principality of Hohenfliess lay only one principality distant from them. This second principality, which was next-door neighbor to the first, and which by breaking through the walls might easily have been merged with it into one common political structure, was called, as is known to geographical readers, Haarhaar. The Lector told the Librarian, as they approached the armorial and boundary stones, that the two courts looked upon each other almost as deadly foes; not so much because they were diplomatic relatives—although it is true that, among princes, uncle, cousin, brother, signify no more than brother-in-law applied to postilions, or father and mother to the old folks among the Brandenburghers—as because they were really relatives, and each other's heirs. It would cost me too much room, if I were disposed to set before the reader the family-trees of the two courts,—which were their Upas-trees and Dragon-trees,—with all their heraldic leaves, water-shoots, and lichens; the result must content him, namely, that Hohenfliess, land and people, would fall to the principality of Haarhaar, in case the hereditary prince, Luigi, the last hollow shoot and sapling of the male stock of Hohenfliess, were to wither away. What hordes of Venetian Lion-heads Haarhaar pours into the land of future inheritance, who are to devour nothing there but learned advertisements and placards, and what knavish bands of political mechanics it colonizes there, as in a sort of Botany Bay, cannot be told for want of time. And yet Haarhaar again, on the other hand, is so generous as to desire nothing more heartily than to see the financial estate of Hohenfliess—its business, agriculture, silk manufactures, and breed of horses—in the highest bloom, and to hate and curse in the highest degree all public extravagance, that enervation of the great intercostal-nerve (money), as the mightiest canonical impediment to population. "The Regent," says the truly philanthropic Prince of Haarhaar, "is the chief shepherd, not the butcher, of the state: not even the wool-shears should he take into his hands so often as the shepherd's-flute; not of the energies and matrimonial prospects of others is our cousin (Luigi) master, but of his own, these he must ruin!"

As they rode into the territory of Hohenfliess, they might have made an excursion to BlumenbÜhl,[27] which lies aside from Pestitz, and taken a look, as it were, at the nursery of Albano (Isola Bella being his cradle), had not the latter felt a burning hunger and thirst for the city, and a dread like hydrophobia of a second leave-taking, which besides only confuses the clear echo of the first. His journey, the conversation of his father, the pictures of the conjurer, the nearness of the academy, had so ruffled up our bird roc's wing-feathers, which at his age are always too long as the steering tail-feathers are too short, that they would only have been sprained in the confinement of BlumenbÜhl. By Heavens! he longed to be something in the state or the world; for he felt a deadly disgust towards that narcotic waste of high life through whose poppy-garden of pleasure men stagger about, sleepy and drunken, till they fall down in a twofold lameness.

It may not have been remembered by the readers of the first Jubilee, because it was in a note, that Albano had never yet been permitted to go to Pestitz, and on very good grounds indeed, which are known, however, to the Knight only, but not to me. This long closing of the city-gates against him only made him the more eager to enter them. And now they stood with their horses upon a broad eminence, whence they saw the church-towers of Pestitz before them in the west, and, if they turned round, the tower of BlumenbÜhl below them to the east; from the one and from the other came floating to them a noonday hum: Albano heard his future and his past sounding together. He looked down into the village, and up at a neat little red house on a neighboring mountain, which gleamed after him, like a bright pictured urn of long-extinguished days. He sighed; he looked over the far building-ground of his future life, and now with loosened rein dashed onward toward the towers of the Linden-city, as towards the palms of his race-ground.

But the neat little house played its antics before him like a red shadow. For, ah! had he not once in that herdsman's hut spent a dreamy day, full of adventures, and that, too, in the very season of childhood, when the soul, on the rainbow-bridge of fancy, glides along, dry-shod, over the walls and ditches of this lower earth? We will now go back with him into this lovely day, this childhood's eve of life's festival, and become acquainted with those earlier hours, which sent back to him so sweetly from this herdsman's hut the Ranz des Vaches of youth.

11. CYCLE.

It was, then, on a magnificent St. James's day—and likewise on the birthday of the Provincial Director, Wehrfritz, who, however, had not received the title yet—that this same director—that was to be—had his chariot trundled out in the morning to ride to Pestitz, and see the Minister, and, as Factor of the Province, convert the flail of the state, by way of experiment, into a drill-plough. He was a brisk, bustling man, to whom a day of furlough was longer than a day of drill to others, and to whom nothing made time pass heavily but pastime. "In the evening, however," he said to himself, "I'll make a good day of it, for it happens to be my birthday." His birthday present was to consist in making one; he proposed, namely, to bring home little Albano an Oesterlein's harpsichord out of his own purse,—little as there was in it,—and a music-master, into the bargain, at the desire of Don Gaspard.

But why not, at the outset, explain all this in the clearest manner to the reader?

Don Gaspard, then, in revising a scheme of education for Albano, had chosen that more attention should be paid to his bodily health than to mental superfetation; he thought the tree of knowledge should be grafted with the tree of life. Ah! whoever sacrifices health to wisdom has generally sacrificed wisdom too, and only inborn not acquired sickliness is profitable to head and heart. Accordingly, Albano had not to lug along, bending under the weight, the many-volumed encyclopÆdia of all sciences in his book-straps, but merely grammars. That is to say, the rector of the place,—named Wehmeier, better known by the title of Band-box-master,—after schooling the village youth for the usual number of hours, was accustomed to seek his fairest Struve's spare hours, his Otia and Noctes HagianÆ, in teaching Albano, and driving into the mill-wheel axle of the everlastingly active boy—impelled by internal streams—alphabetic pins,—so as to make it the barrel of a speech-organ. Of course, however, Zesara soon wished to move something heavier than the key-board of languages; thus, for example, the language-organ barrel became, in a proper sense, the barrel of a hand-organ. For whole hours, without any special knowledge of counterpoint, would he practise on the parish organ (he knew neither note nor key, and stood hard, all through the piece, on the thundering pedal), trying his hand at the most horrible discords, before which the Enharmonics of all Piccinists must be struck dumb, only to bury himself so much the longer and deeper in the accidental prize of a chord. So, also, did his soul, full of sap, work off its energy in leaf-buds, as it were, and shoots and runners, by making pictures, clay statuary, sun-dials, and designs of all sorts, and even in the juristical rockery of his foster-father, for example, in Fabri's State Chancery, it sent its thirsty roots around and out over the dry leaves, as plants do often in herbariums. O, how he pined for lessons and teachers vaguely dreamed of (just as in childhood he had aspired from octavos to quartos, from quarto to folio, from folio even to a book as large as the world, which would be the world itself)! But so much the better! only hunger digests, only love impregnates; the sigh of longing alone is the animating aura seminalis to the Orpheus egg of knowledge. This you do not consider, you flying teachers, who give children the draught earlier than the thirst; you who, like some florists, insert into the split stock of the flowers ready-made lack-dyes, and put foreign musk into their cups, instead of simply giving them morning sun and flower-soil,—and who grant young souls no quiet hours, but bustle round them during the dusting period of their blooming vine, against all the rules of the vine-dressers, with your hoeing and your dunging and your clipping. O, can you ever, when you thus prematurely force them, with their unripe organs, into the great realm of truths and beauties, just as we all, alas! with our dark senses, creep into lovely Nature, and blunt ourselves to the perception of her beauty,—can you ever, in any way, make good to them the great year which they would have lived to see, had they, growing up like the new-created Adam, been able to turn round with their open, thirsty senses, in the glorious universe of spirits? Hence it is that your ÉlÈves so nearly resemble the foot-paths, which in spring grow green first of all, but at a later period wind along yellow and hard-trodden through the blooming meadows.

Wehrfritz, as he stood on the carriage-steps and turned his face towards him, repeated his charge to have an oversight of the young Count, and made the mark ["with care"] with which merchants commend valuable boxes of goods to the post, strong and thick upon him: he loved the fiery child as his own (he had only one, and that not a son); the Knight had confidence in him, and, to justify it, since the point of honor was the centre of gravity and pole of all his motions, he would, without hesitation, if the boy, for instance, should break his head, cut his own off; and finally Albano must stand a remarkably good examination at evening before the new teacher from the city.

Albina von Wehrfritz, the spouse, promised everything in the name of all that was sacred; she might have compared herself to the Evangelists Mark and John, because her impetuous husband quite often represented the creatures who are pictured as the companions of the two saints, those king-beasts, the lion and the eagle, just as many another wife, in reference to her companion, may be compared with Luke, and mine with Matthew.[28] Besides, she had bespoken for the evening a little family feast, full of sportive, party-colored ephemerons of joy, and by great good luck already, some days before, the diploma had come in which installed our Wehrfritz as Provincial Director, and which had been laid up against this day as a birthday christening present.

But hardly had Wehrfritz got beyond the castle garden when Albano stepped forth with his project, and announced his intention of sitting out the whole holiday up there in the solitary little shooting-house; for he loved to play alone, and an elderly guest was pleasanter to him than a boy to play with. Women are like Father Lodoli, who (according to Lambert's day-book) shunned nothing so much as the little word, Yes; at least, they do not say it till after, No. The foster-mother (I will, however, in future, cut off from her and from the foster-sister, Rabette, that annoying foster) said, without thinking, No, although she knew that she had never yet carried one through against the stubborn little fellow. Then she borrowed very good dehortations from the will and pleasure of the Provincial Director, and bade him consider,—then the red-cheeked, good-natured Rabette took her brother's part, and pleaded for him, without knowing why,—then Albina protested at least he should not expect his dinner to be sent to him on the mountain,—then he marched out of the yard.... So have I often stood by and watched how the female elbows and knuckles, during the stemming of a strong opposition, gradually, before my eyes, became gristle, and bent up. Only in the presence of Wehrfritz had Albina strength enough for a long No.

12. CYCLE.

Our hero had passed over from those childish years in which Hercules strangled the serpents, into the years of confirmation, when he warmed them under his waistcoat, to behead them again in later years. Exultingly did his new and old Adam—they flew side by side—flap their wings out there under a blue heaven which had absolutely no anchoring ground. What cared he for meal-time? All children before and during a journey carry no stomach under their wings, just as that of the butterfly shrinks up when his wings are spread. The oft-mentioned herdsman's hut, or little shooting-house, was nothing less than a shooting-house with a sentry-box, for a pensioned soldier's wife, with a shooting-stand in the lower story and a summer-house chamber in the upper, wherein old Wehrfritz every summer meant to have a rural party and a bird shooting, but never had it, because the poor man dismasted and unrigged himself in his work-chamber as others do in their dining-room. For, although the state entices its servants like dogs for the tenth time, only to cudgel them off again for the eleventh, and although Wehrfritz every assize day forswore all state business and earnings,—because an honest man like him finds always in the body politic as much to restore as in the antique statues of which only the stone drapery remains,—nevertheless, he knew no softer couch and feather-bed to rest on, than a still higher bench of oars, and he was just now making every exertion to be Provincial Director.

The German courts will have their own thoughts on the subject when I offer them the following boyish idyl. My black-eyed shepherd stormed the herdsman's mountain fortification, and received from the soldier's wife the door-key to the white and green summer cabinet. By Heavens! when all eastern and western window-shutters and windows were flung open, and the wind stole fluttering through the papers and cooling through the sweltry chamber, and when, outside, heaven and earth stood round about the windows and looked in beckoning,—when Albano beheld, under the window toward the east, the deep broad valley with the leaping, stony brook, on which all the glimmering disks of light which, like pebbles, the sun shot aslant, glanced up the mountain side,—when at the western window he saw, behind hills and woods, the arc of the sky, the mountain of the Linden-city, that slept like a coiled-up giant on the earth,—when he placed himself at one window after another, and said, "How magnificent!" then his raptures in the chamber grew at last so exalted, that he must needs go forth, in order, out of doors, to exalt them still higher.

The Goddess of Peace seemed to have here her church and her church seat. The active soldier's wife was planting early peas in a little garden full of high bushes, and now and then threw up a clod of earth into the cherry-tree among the feathered fruit-thieves, and again fell to sprinkling indefatigably the new linen and the planted salad, and yet ran willingly from time to time to the little ten-year-old maiden, who, blind from the measles, sat knitting on the door-sill, and only when she dropped a stitch called on her mother as interposing goddess. Albano stationed himself on the outermost balcony of the lovely opening valley, and every fanning of the wind breathed into his heart the old childish longing, that he could only fly. Ah, what bliss thus to snatch himself away from the receding earthly footstool, and cast himself free and passive into the broad ether!—and so plashing up and down in the cool, all-pervading air-bath, to fly at mid-day into the darkling cloud, and unseen to float beside the lark as she warbles below it,—or to sweep after the eagle, and in the flight to see cities only as sculptured assemblages of steps, and long streams only as gray, loose threads drawn between two or three countries, and meadows and hills shrunk up to little color-grains and colored shadows, and at length alight on the peak of a tower, and place himself over against the blazing evening sun, and then to soar upward when he had sunk, and look down once more into his eye still beaming on, bright and open, in the vault of night, and at last, when the earth-ball, whirling over, hides his orb, to flutter, intoxicated with rapture, into the forest-conflagration of all the red clouds!...

Whence comes it that these bodily wings lift us like spiritual ones? Whence had Albano this irrepressible longing for heights, for the slater's weaver-shuttle, for mountain-peaks, for the balloon,—just as if these were helpers out of bed to the prisoners of this low earth-couch? Ah, thou dear deluded one! Thy soul, still covered with its chrysalis shell, confounds as yet the horizon of the eye with the horizon of the heart, and outer elevation with inner, and soars through the physical heaven after the ideal one! For the same power which in the presence of great thoughts lifts our head and our body and expands the chest, raises the body also even with the dark yearning after greatness, and the chrysalis swells with the beating wings of the Psyche; yes, it must needs be, that by the same band wherewith the soul draws up the body the body also can lift up the soul.

The least Albano could do was to fly on foot down the mountain, to wade along with the brook, which was running away into the pale-green birch thicket to cool itself. Often before had his Robinsonading mania blown him to all points and leaves of the wind-rose,[29] and he loved to go with an unknown road a pretty piece of way to see what way it would itself take. He ran along on the silver Ariadne's thread of the brook, deep into the green labyrinth, and proposed, in fact, to come out through the back door of the long thicket upon a distant prospect. He could not accomplish it,—the birches grew now lighter, now darker, the brook broader,—the larks seemed to sing, out there, far and high overhead;—but he was obstinate. Extremes had from of old a magnetic polarity for him; as the medium had only points of indifference. Thus, for example, except the highest degree of the barometer, no other was so agreeable to him as the lowest, and the shortest day was as welcome as the longest; but the day after either was fatal.[30]

At last, after the progress of some hours in time and space, he heard, beyond the lightening birches, and through a noise louder than that of the brook, his name uttered repeatedly, in low tones of commendation, by two female voices. Instantly he galloped panting back again, indifferent to the risk of lungs and life. He heard his name long after again called out on all sides of him, but in a cry;—it was his private patron saint, the castellain of the hut, who fired these shots of distress on his account at the foot of the mountain.

He went up thither, and the round table of the earth lay clear and with a singularly softening aspect around his thirsty eye. Truly, the stretch of distance, together with weariness, must have reminded this bird of passage, behind the song-grating of the breast, of his own distant lands and times, and have made him melancholy at the thought, when the landscape so mottled with red roofs spread out before him its white, glistening stones and ponds, like light-magnets and sun-splinters,—when he saw on the long, gray causeway to Linden-town—views of which hung in the summer-house, and of which two spires shot up among the mountains—distant travellers plodding on toward the city whose gates for him were closed,—and when, indeed, everything seemed flying westward, the pigeons that went whispering by, floating over the grain-fields, and the shadows of the clouds that glided lightly away over high gardens.... Ah, the youngest heart has the waves of the oldest, only without the sounding-lead to fathom their depths! Learned Germany has, I perceive, for several cycles, held itself ready for great fates and fatalities, which are to give this herdsman's day of my hero the necessary dignity; I, who ought to have the first knowledge on the subject, do not at present know of any such. Childhood—ah yes, every age—often leaves behind in our hearts imperishable days, which every other heart had forgotten: so did this day never fade from Albano's. Sometimes a child's-day is at once made immortal by a clearer glimpse of consciousness; in children, especially such as Zesara, the spiritual eye turns far earlier and more sharply upon the world within the breast than they show or we imagine.

Now it struck one o'clock in the castle-tower. The near and beloved tone, reminding him of his near foster-mother, and of the denied dinner, and the sight of the little blind one, who already had her twig of the bread-tree or her dry reindeer's moss in her hand,—and the thought that this was the birthday of his foster-father,—and his inexpressible love for his afflicted mother, upon whose neck he often suddenly fell when he was alone,—and his heart, bedewed with Nature, made him begin to weep. But not for this did the stubborn little fellow go home; only the Alpine shepherdess had run on unbidden to betray the fugitive to his seeking mother.

He would fain in this noonday stillness extort from the little blind Lea, upon whose countenance a soft, delicate line-work ran legibly through the punctuation of the pocks, a few words, or at least, as a fellow-laborer, the long stick wherewith she had to drive the pigeons from the peas and the sparrows from the cherries; but she pressed her arm in silence against her eyes, bashful before the distinguished young gentleman. At last the woman brought the pottage for the lost son, and from Rabette a little smelling-bottle of dessert-wine into the bargain.

Albina von Wehrfritz was one of those women who, unlike states, keep only their promises, but never a threat,—resembling the forest-officers of Nuremberg, who, upon the smallest violation of the forest-laws, impose a fine of one hundred florins, and in the same hour modify it to one hundred kreutzers.[31] They, however, like Solon, who gave out his laws for a hundred years in advance, give out theirs according to the proportion of their smaller jurisdiction, to last one hundred seconds.

13. CYCLE.

I would make more out of Albano's commemoration-dinner, which he, like a grown-up trencher-man, could carve in the little chamber, and distribute among the family circle, and at which he could fill for himself, were I not going to meet weightier incidents which befell during the carrying back of the table dinner-service.

Albano went out, with the whole sea of his inner being sparkling and phosphorescing under the influence of the wine and the forenoon, and the blue heaven fluttering in stronger breezes around him. He felt as if the morning had long since gone by; and he remembered it with a tender emotion, as we all in youth remember childhood, in age youth,—even as at evening we remember the morning,—and the forms of Nature drew nearer to him and moved their eyes like Catholic images. Thus does the present offer us only shapes for optical anamorphoses, and only our spirit is the sublime mirror which transposes them into fair human forms. With what a sweet dip into dreams did he, when he met the fanning of the eastern wind, close his eyes, and draw the hum of the landscape, the screaming of the cocks and birds, and a herdsman's flute, as if deeper and deeper into his shaded soul! And then when he opened his eyes again on the shore of the mountain, there lay peaceful down below in the valley the pastured white lambs by the side of the flutist, and overhead in heaven lay stretched out far away above them the shining, fleecy lamb-clouds!

Meanwhile, he was fain for once to take the liberty of shutting his eyes and groping too far into the garden,—besides, the blind girl did not see,—holding his arms open before him so as not to run against anything, when all at once his breast touched a second, and looking up, he found the trembling maiden so near to him, who bent aside, stammering, "Ah, no! ah, no!" "It is only I," said the innocent one, holding her fast; "truly, I will not harm thee!"—and as she, with a modest shyness, trusted him, he held her a little while, and gazed down on her bowed head with sweet emotion.

Heartily glad would he have been to give the terrified one dole-money and benefits in this comedy for the poor; he had, however, nothing by him, till, luckily, his sister Rabette, that bandagist,—from whose ribbon mania he erroneously concluded that many girls are diabolically possessed for ribbons, and swallow them like jugglers, but never give them back,—she, and his new hair-band, came into his mind. He wound off, joyfully, the long, silken swathing-band from his head on hers. But the lovely neighborhood, the tie-work of an inner, finer band, and the blessedness of giving, and the vivacity of his inborn exuberance, so overcame him, that he would gladly have emptied the Green Cellar of Dresden into her apron, when a Jew pedler, with his smaller, silken one on his stomach, and with a bagful of bought-up hair on his back, came trudging up the Pestitz road. The Jew suffered himself, very willingly, to be called, but nothing to be borrowed from him, despite all bills of exchange proposed to be drawn upon parents and pocket money. Ah, a magnificent red cap-ribbon would have been as becoming to Lea's blind eyes as a red bandage to a wound! For a blind lady loves to prink herself as much as one who can see, unless she is self-conceited, and would rather please herself in the glass than others out of it. The merchant was very glad to let her feel of the ribbon, and said he bought up hair in the villages, and yesterday the children of the inn, with a piece of burning punk, had crisped up his whole sackful of queues into short wool, and if the young gentleman would let him trim his brown hair down to the nape of the neck, he should, on the spot, have the ribbon, and a very serviceable leather queue of WÜrzburg fabric into the bargain. What was to be done? The ribbon was very red,—so was Lea with hope,—the Jew said he must pack up,—besides, the hair-queue which he had hitherto worn ran like a second backbone down over the whole of the first, and became to Alban, by reason of the tedious swathing, every morning, a check-rein and snaffle-bridle of his mettle. In brief, the poor, plucked hare resigned to the Jew the royal French InsignÉ, and buckled on the WÜrzburg sheath.

And now he shook her hand right soundly, and said, with a whole Paradise of loving joyousness in his face: "The ribbon is, no doubt, very pleasant to thee, thou poor, blind thing!" Then the everlasting rogue actually climbed the cherry-tree in order, up there, as a living scare-crow, to spoil the cherries for the sparrows, and, as a fruit-god, to throw down several of them to her as rosaries and festoons.

By Heaven! up there among the heart-cherries, it seemed as if real wolf-cherries must be working in the head of the boy: as the earth had her dark, middle ages, so have children often dark, middle days, full of pure monkery and mischief. On the high boughs, the growing landscape, and the sun declining towards the mountains, and particularly the spires of Pestitz, gleamed upon him with such heavenly light, that he could not now imagine to himself anything higher than the bird-pole near him, nor any more blessedly enthroned crown-eagle than one on the pole....

But now I beg every one of my fair readers either to step into the shooting-house, or make the best of her way out of it with the soldier's wife, who is running on to tell the naughty thing to her gracious lady,—for few of them can stand it out with me to see our hero, the male support of Titan, firmly planted by some farmers' boys—to whom, moreover, Albina has intrusted the remarche-rÈglement of hastening his return—on a cross-stick, which is fitted in just under the crotch of the bird-pole, and with his belly bound down to it, and so lying horizontal in the air, gradually lifted through the wide sweep of the arch, and held up in mid-heaven. It is too bad! but the servants could not possibly resist the supplications of his mighty eyes, his picturesque will and spirit, and the offered recompenses and coronation-coins, in comparison with which he verily weighed only half as much as the last bird.

I am, nevertheless, partial to thee, little one, despite that stiff dare-neck of thine built up between head and heart. Thy monstrous Baroque-pearls of energies will time soon, as the artists in the Green Cellar do with physical pearls, use up in the finishing of a fine figure!

The imperial history of our imperial eagle on his pedestal, covering at the same time the events that took place on the mountain, when the Band-box master and Provincial Director came accidentally to the manned bird-pole, shall be incontinently resumed, when we have the 14th Cycle.

14. CYCLE.

Master Wehmeier, who could not at a distance explain to himself the form and motion of the bird, had made up towards it, and now saw his pupil lifted up on the cross. He fell instantly into the plunge-bath of an icy shudder at his daring, but soon came out of this into the shower-bath of a perspiring anxiety, which came over him at the thought of seeing every minute his ÉlÈve fall down and be crushed into twenty-six fragments, like Osiris, or into thirty, like the Medicean Venus; "and this too, now," he thought besides, "just as I have brought the young Satan so far along in languages, and lived to win some honor by him." He therefore scolded only the operators in the raising department, but not the sentinel aloft, because there was reason to apprehend he might take a lurch in the effort of answering, and pitch down. Hard upon the heels of the optical chariot with which the Devil threatened to run over the master, thus spell-bound in the circle of agonizing anxiety, followed a real one, wherein sat the future Provincial Director. Ah, good God! Besides, the Director always filled up his whole gall-bladder full of bitter extracts at the Minister's house, merely because he found there better-behaved and stiller children, without, however, reflecting—like a hundred other fathers who must be included in the charge—that children, like their parents, appear better to strangers than they are, and that, above all, city life, instead of the porous, thick bark of village life, overlays them with a smooth, white birch-roll, while yet, in the end, like their parents and courtiers, they prove to resemble chestnuts, being smooth only on the outer shell, but within confoundedly bristly. Thus surely will the finest man in the country always be outwitted by at least princes and ministers, who are ten years old,—supposing even he could manage it more easily with their fathers.

When Wehrfritz saw his foster-son in his eyrie on the Schreckhorn, and the Band-box master below, looking up at him, he imagined the instructor had arranged it all, and began loudly to vent upon his neck, from the locked-up carriage, a little heaven of thunder-storms and thunder-claps. The persecuted Wehmeier began also, upon the mountain, to bawl up at the Schreckhorn, by way of making it evident to the Director that he was in the way of his office, and with the hammer of the law, as with a forming stamp-hammer, could mould a pupil as well as another man. The soldier's wife wrung her hands,—the servants arranged themselves for the taking down from the cross,—the poor little fellow, in a fever, drew his knife, and called down, "He would instantly cut himself loose and cast himself down so soon as ever any one should let down the pole." He would have done it—and put an untimely end to his life and my Titan—merely because he dreaded the disgrace of the real and verbal insults he might get from his father before so many people (yes, in the chariot sat a gentleman who was a perfect stranger) worse than suicide and hell. But the Director, full of foolhardihood himself, and yet proportionately hating it in a child, was not to be disconcerted at that, and cried out, in a terrible tone, after the servant who had the key of the coach-door; he would get out and go up. He was indescribably exasperated, first, because behind the coach he had fastened on an Oesterlein's harpsichord as a gift for the present day of joy;—ah, Albano! why do thy joys, like the slurs of an ale-house fiddler, end in a discord?—and, secondly, because he had there a singing-dancing-music-and fencing-master from the polished and brilliant house of the Minister for Albano, sitting beside him on the cushion as spectator of this dÉbut. Gottlieb sprang from the box, and round before the coach-door, ran his hand, cursing, through all his pockets;—the coach-key was not in one of them. The incarcerated Director lashed himself up and down in his cage like a wagging leopard, and his fury was like that of a lion, who, when one hunter after another has shot at him, flies at the third. At all events, there was Alban, in his noose, sawing the air to and fro. The Band-box master was best off; for he was half dead, and his cold body, running all away in a sweat of agony, transmitted little more sense of the outward world; his consciousness was packed away tight and good as snuff in cold lead.

Ah, I feel more keenly for the tormented boy than if I were sitting with him up on the pole; over his touchingly noble countenance, with its finely-curved nose, shame and the western aurora throw a purple hue, and the low sun hangs with kisses on his cheeks, as if on the last and highest roses of the dark earth, and he must withdraw his defiant eyes from the beloved sun and from the day which still dwells thereon, and from the two steeple knobs of the Linden-city which glimmer on the sides turned from him, and sorrowfully cast down his strongly-drawn and sharply-angled eyebrows, which Dian likened to the too heroic and energetic ones of the infant Jesus in Raphael's ascending Madonna, to behold the hot and close altercation which was taking place on the ground below.

Gottlieb, with all his pains, could not squeeze out the key, for he had it in his pocket, and in his hand, and did not like much to produce it, from partiality for the young master, whom the whole service loved, "as if they could eat him,"—as much as they loved the nine-pin alley. He voted for sending and fetching the lock-smith, but the coachman outvoted him, with the advice to drive immediately to the door of the work-shop,—and growled at the horses, and drove off the imprisoned, controversial preacher in his pulpit, with the packed-up Oesterlein's harpsichord, at a smart trot. All that the Bombardier, during Gottlieb's mounting, had time to throw out of the carriage, consisted in his staving through a window, and firing, from the port-hole, a few of the most indispensable parting shots at the ill-omened bird on the pole.

By this time the magister had recovered his spirit and vexation, and boldly commanded the taking down of the Absalom. While the child came slowly down before him on his perch, he inserted the five incisor-teeth of his fingers, as a music-pen, into his scalp, and ruled or raked down along his occiput, with a view to playfully rectifying the crooked line of the hair, by pulling it moderately with his hand, as with the end of a fiddle-stick, when, to his astonishment, off came from my hero the WÜrzburg queue like a tail-feather.

Wehmeier stared at the cauda prehensilis (the ring-tail), and by his attention's being thus drawn off to the lesser fault, Albano gained as much as Alcibiades did from the lopping off of the tail of his—Robespierre. The magister thanked God that he would not sup to-day with old Wehrfritz, and sent him, with his mock queue, brow-beaten, home.

15. CYCLE.

The good-hearted Albina had been all day long removing out of the way of her lord all inflammatory stuff (for the vitriol naptha of his nervous spirit caught the fire of anger afar off), in order that nothing might transform her pleasure-castles into incendiary places of joy,—yes, as a sort of suburbs to the heavenly Jerusalem of the evening, Rabette had packed away an orchestra of miners that had chanced to pass by, in the cabinet of the dining-room,—and for Albano Albina had already contrived an heraldic costume, in which he should deliver to him the vocation of the Province. Ah, but what did the lady get from it all but flames, which Wehrfritz vomited forth at his entrance, while he, as a camel in his maw, had laid up besides, a long, cold stream of water for the sprinkling of the magister?

Albina, who, like most women, took the gall-stone pelting of her husband for the fifty pounds of passengers' ballast, which, to a passenger in the marriage-stage-coach, go free, cheerfully gave him, at first, as ever, credit of being right, and concealed every tear of unhappiness, because cold sprinkling hardens men and salad,—then step by step she took back the right,—but made the blame at first mild on her tongue, as nurses make the washing-water of the children lukewarm in their mouths,—and at last said he should just give the child up to her.

But we are making old Wehrfritz swell under our hand to a dragon of the Apocalypse, to a beast of Gevaudan, and a tyrant, whereas he is in reality only a lamb with two little horns. Had he not on his birth-feast in the drudging year of his slaving life a claim upon one unburdened evening, at least with a child whom he loved more strongly than his own, and for whom he had loaded himself down with a harpsichord and a teacher? And had he not a hundred times forbidden him—though he himself dared and did too much—to imitate him, and risk himself upon horseback, or in a tempest, in a pouring rain, or in a snow-storm? And had he not just come from the pedagogical knout-master, the Minister, whose educational system was only a longer real territion and a shorter condemnation? And does not the sight of stern parents make one sterner, and of mild ones, on the contrary, milder?

Albano first met Rabette with his leathern hind-axle in his hand, on his defiant way to the father's study, and therefore to the court-martial punishment of a real revolutionary tribunal. But she caught him from behind, with the angelic greeting, "Art thou here, Absalom?" and set him down by force; and, after the necessary astonishment and questioning, tied on the vena cava of his hair tightly and ungently, and showed up to him, in a fearful light, the whirlwind of paternal wrath that awaited him; and again, in a ludicrous light, the lull of the musical mountain-department, who, near the dining-room, that race-ground and hunting-ground of the Director, striding up and down in rage and impatience, were waiting with a pause for times of peace; and finally she released him with a kiss, saying, "I pity you, you rogue!"

He marched, with a defiance which the tightness of his hair aggravated, into the dining-room. "Out of my sight!" said the sparkling assailant. Alban instantly stepped back out of the door, enraged at the injustice of this wrath, and for that very reason the less troubled at its unhealthiness; for his benefactor kept passionately running up to the table, which was spread for the birthday feast, and, after an old bad habit of his, extinguishing the well-kindled lime-pit of his indignation with wine.

In a few moments the musical academy and mining company, transformed by their ill-humor into growling contra-bassists, struck up also. The time had been tedious to them in the dry cabinet, so the bassoonist and the violinist had taken it into their heads to entertain themselves with a low tuning. The Director, who could not comprehend what in the world that forlorn sound was that floated around him, took it for some time to be a melodious humming in his ears, when suddenly the hammer-master of the dulcimer let his musical hammer fall on the stringed floor. Wehrfritz in an instant tore open the doors, and saw before him the whole musical nest and conspiracy sitting in a circle, armed and waiting. He asked them, hastily, "What business they had in the cabinet?" and, after a flying donation of a few curses and cuffs, ordered the whole garrison, without any tinkling noise, with their leather aprons and culs de Paris, to take themselves off instantly.

Albina, with a tender look, beckoned her outlawed darling into her sewing-chamber, where she asked him, quite composedly, because she knew he would not lie, to tell the truth. After hearing his report, she represented to him a little his fault (although she blamed the present child, in comparison with the absent man, pretty much in the style in which she had previously blamed the present man, in comparison with the absent child), and still more the consequences; she pointed out (untying and tying again his cravat the while, and buttoning some of his waistcoat buttons) how her husband was disgraced in Albano's person before the second school-consul, (with four and twenty Fasces,) whom he had brought with him, the music- and dancing-master, Mr. Von Falterle, who was up-stairs dressing himself; how the dancing-master would certainly write all about it to Don Gaspard; and how for her good man the whole sweet, painted jelly-apple of to-day's joy had been turned into water: and now he must, even on this festive day, afflict his soul in solitude, and, perhaps, catch his death from drinking so much to drown his anger. Women, like harpers, usually, during their playing, convert, with small pedals, the whole tones of truth into semi-tones. After she had still further enumerated to him all the paternal evening-tempests which he had ever drawn upon himself by his rides and his Robinson's voyages of discovery, and whose thunder-claps had, on every occasion, only melted down the lightning-conductor (namely, herself), she added, with that touching tone flowing, not from the bony throat, but from the swelling heart, "Ah, Albano, thou wilt one day think of thy foster-mother, when it is too late!" and melted into tears.

Hitherto the unmeltable slags and the molten portion of his heart had been boiling up together within him, and the warm flood had pressed upward, ever higher and hotter, in his bosom, only his face had remained cold and hard,—for certain persons have, exactly at the melting point, the greatest appearance and capacity of hardening, as snow freezes just before a thaw; but now the strain upon the too tightly-bound queue, which was the paradoxical sign of the approaching eruption, made him, in the paroxysm of his fury, tear the WÜrzburg appendage off over his head. Before Albina saw it, she had handed him the Directorship appointment, with the words, "I ought hardly to do it; but just hand it to him, and say it was my present, and that thou wilt be quite another boy in future." But when she saw his hand armed, she asked, in a terrified tone, with the deep echo of a wearied-out grief, "Alban!" and turned immediately away from the poor child, whose pain she misunderstood, with too bitter tears, and said: "What new trouble is this? O, how you all torment my heart to-day! Go away! O, come here," she called after him, "and relate the circumstances!" And when he had innocently and truly done this, her voice, overpowered with tears, could no longer blame him, but only say, mildly, "Well, then, carry the present." Nevertheless, she had it in mind to represent to her husband the abbreviation of the hair as an act of obedience to her will, and to the fashion of city children in high life.

Alban went; but on the painful way, the full glands of his tears and his long-repressed heart broke forth, and he entered with eyes still weeping before his solitary foster-father, who was resting his tired and thinking head; and the boy held out to him, while yet a great way off, the big-sealed document, and could only say, "The present," and nothing more, and sparks darted with the storm-drops from his hot eyes. Lay thyself, innocent one, softly on thy father's unbuttoned bosom; and while he holds in his right hand the enchanted cup of glory, and makes himself drunk with it, let him not on any account push thee away with his left! The repelling hand will by and by come to pulsate languidly and lightly upon thy wet, fiery cheeks, and warm, penitent eyes: then will the old man read the Decretum over again still more slowly, so as almost to postpone the very first sound; then will he, when thou, with indescribable impetuosity, pressest his hand to thy face to kiss it, make appear as if he had just awaked, and say, with saltpetre coldness and glistening eyes, "Call mother"; and then, when thou liftest upon him thy glowing countenance all quivering with love from under thy downfallen locks, and when they are flung softly back from thy cherry cheeks,—then will he look a pretty long time after his departing darling, and brush away something from his eyes, that he may run over the address of the diploma at his will.

Say, Albano, have I not guessed right?

Every post of honor lifts the heart of a man who is placed on it above the vapor of life, the hail-clouds of calamity, the frosty mists of discontent, and the inflammable air of wrath. I will hold the magic leaf of a favorable criticism before a gnashing were-wolf: immediately he shall stand before me as a licking lamb, with little twirling tail; and if the wife of an author could only play before her heated literary partner every time a critical trumpeter's piece on Fame's trumpet, he would become like an angel, and she like that ale-house fiddler who, in his bear-catching, softened the Saul in Bruin by his jigs.

Wehrfritz came to meet Albina as a new-born seraph, and recounted to her his glory. Yes, in order to atone to her for the explosions of his Etna, he said not, as usual, nolo episcopari; he did not say he was hemmed round by an impassable mountain chain of labors; but, instead of that perverse drawing back of the hand from the out-shaking cornucopia of fortune,—instead of that virgin bashfulness of rapture which is more common to brides,—he betrayed the heartiness of a widow, and told Albina her wishes of the morning had already become gifts; and asked what had become of the promised supper, and the company, and the Magister, and the dancing-master (whom the other had not yet seen), and Rabette, and all.

But Albina had already long since announced to the Magister, through Albano, the invitation, and the dispersion of all storms, and the arrival of the new commission. Wehmeier, to tell the truth, had the greatest reluctance to eat with a nobleman, merely because, as entertaining acteur of the table, he had so much to do with conversing, savoir vivre, looking out for others, keeping his limbs in proper attitude, and passing all eatables, that, for want of leisure, he was obliged to swallow such little things as pickled cucumbers, chestnuts, crabs' tails, and the like, down whole, and without tasting them; so that afterward he often had to carry round with him the hard fodder, like a swallowed Jonah, for three days together in the hunter's pouch of his stomach. Only this time he gladly dressed himself for the feast, because he was curious and angry about his pedagogical colleague, and that out of anxiety lest haply this new joint-tenant should assume to himself the magnificent winter crop in Alban's sowed field as his own summer crop. He ascribed to his abbreviated method of teaching all the wonderful energies of his pupil, i. e. to the water-soil the aromatic essence of the plant which grew therein.[32]

With so much the greater indulgent love he came, leading with his own hand the halved pupil, to Rabette's cabinet, in a sap-green plush with a three-leaved collar. "Mr. Von Falterle here," said Rabette on his entrance, not from raillery, but from inconsiderateness; "thought some time ago it was you when the dog tried to get in." "My dear sir," replied coldly and gravely the paradeur of a Falterle by the side of our farm-horse, "the dog scratched at the door; but it is usual, as well at the minister's as in all great houses of Paris, for every one to scratch with the finger-nail when he wishes admittance merely into a cabinet, and not into a principal apartment."

What a splendidly picturesque contrast of the two brothers-in-office!—the master of accomplishments with the motley scarf-skin or hind-apron of a yellow summer-dress, as if with the yellow outer wings of a buttermoth, whose dark under-wings represent the waistcoat (when he unbuttons it); Wehmeier, on the other hand, in a roomy, sap-green plush, which a tent-maker seemed to have hung on him, and with belly and shanks quivering in the black velvet half-mourning of candidates, who wear it till they carbonize into clear black. Falterle had his glazed frost pantaloons plated and cast round his legs, and every wrinkle in them produced one upon his face, as if the latter were the lining of the former; while along the thighs of the Band-box-master wound upward the cockle-stairs of his swaddling modests.[33] The former in bridal-shoes, the latter in pump-chambers,—the one flapping up like a soft, slimy gold tench, with the belly-fins of his bosom-ruffles, with the side-fins of his hand-ruffles, and with the tail-fins of a trinomial root or queue hanging on three little ermine tails; the Magister, in his green plush, looking for all the world like a green whiting or a chub. A magnificent set-off, I repeat!

The whiting would gladly have eaten up the tench, when the goldfish led forth on his right arm Rabette, and on his left Albano, to dinner. But now it grew much worse. Alban, with his usual impetuosity, had his napkin open first,—which became now, as it were, introductory programme and dokimasticum of Falterle's system of teaching. "PosÉment, Monsieur," said he to the novice, "il est messÉant de dÉplier la serviette avant que les autres aient dÉpliÉ les leurs." After some minutes, Alban thought he would blow his soup cool; it was one À la BrittaniÈre, with rings. "Il est mÉsseant, Monsieur," said the master of accomplishments, "de souffler sa soupe." The Band-box-master, who had already made up his mouth to vent a puff from the bellows of his chest at a spoonful of rings, stopped short, frightened into a dead calm.

When afterward a veal-stuffed cabbage-bomb fell like a central sun on the table-cloth, the Magister boldly gobbled down the burning minced veal, as a juggler or an ostrich swallows glowing coals, and breathed more inwardly than outwardly.

After the bomb, came in a pike au four, to which, as is well known, the cutting away of the head and tail, and the closing up of the belly give the appearance of a roe's loin. When Albano asked his old teacher what it was, the latter replied, "A delicate roe's loin." "Pardonnez, Monsieur," said his rival gourmand, "c'est du brochet au four, mon cher Compte; mais il est mÉsseant de demander le nom de quelque mets qu'il soit,—on feint de le savoir."

It is easy to show that this horizontal shot from a double rifle pierced through the Magister's marrow and bone; the instruments of passion which lay in the cut-off head of the pike au four, as in an armory, continued to do their execution in his. Like most schoolmasters, he thought himself to have the finest manners, so long as he taught them, and fought against bad ones; so long he prized them uncommonly, just as he did his dress; but when he was outdone in either, then he must needs despise them from his heart. It brought him to his legs again that he was all the while silently comparing the master of accomplishments with the two Catos and Homer's heroes, who ate not much better than swine, and that he thus tied the Viennite to a pillory, and thrashed him most lustily thereon, with one hand, while with the other he rung above him the shame-bell. Yes, he placed himself, in order to make his official brother small, upon a distant planet, and looked down upon the bomb and the pike au four, and could not help laughing up there on his planet, to find that this yellow-silk shop-keeper of Nature, with his rubbish of brains, was no bigger than a paste-eel. Then he pitied his forsaken pupil, and so came down again, and swore on the way to weed as much out of him every day as that other fellow raked in.

We shall learn quite soon enough how Albano's nerves quivered on this lathe, and under these smoothing-planes. The Director was indescribably delighted with this pedagogical cutting and polishing of so great a diamond, although the cutting (according to Jeffries) takes from all diamonds half their weight, and although he himself had all his, and more carats than angles. Wehrfritz could never entirely forgive,—at which point he was now aiming, because he had brought with him for the little one the Oesterleins harpsichord,—until at least with one word he had inflicted a short martyrdom; accordingly, blind to Albano's concealed bloody expiation of the fault, he communicated to the company how strictly the Minister educated his children, how they, e. g., for any involuntary coughing or laughing at the table, like Prussian cavalry soldiers, who fall off or lose their hats in the wind, suffer punishment, and how they were, to be sure, no older than Albano, but quite as well-mannered as grown people. At the house of the Minister he had, on the contrary, boasted to-day the acquirements of his foster-son; but many parents build up in every other house smoking altars of incense for the same child, which in their own they smoke with brimstone, like vines and bees. Besides, deuse take it! they, like princes (fathers of their country), make redoubled demands precisely when children have satisfied immoderate ones; so that the latter, by opera supererogationis in the shape of advanced lessons, forfeit rather than win their play-hours. Do we not admire it in great philosophers, e. g. Malebranche, and great generals, e. g. Scipio, that, after the greatest achievements which they made in the kingdom of truths, or in a geographical, they betook themselves to the nursery, and there carried on real child's fooleries, in order gently to relax the bow wherewith they had shot so many lies and liars to the ground. And why shall not this simile, wherewith St. John defended himself when he allowed himself a play-hour with his tame partridge, also excuse children for being children, when they have previously stretched too crooked the yet thin bow?

But now on with our story! Old Wehrfritz recounted to Rabette, in a very friendly manner, "how he had seen to-day the pupil of Don Zesara, the magnificent Countess de Romeiro, actually only twelve years old, but with such a deportment as only a court dame had, and how the noble Knight experienced more joy than usual in his little ward." These hard, clattering words tore, as if he had hydrophobia, the open nerves of the ambitious boy, since the Knight had hitherto been to him the life's-goal, the eternal wish, and the frÈre terrible, wherewith they kept him under,—but he sat still there without a sign, and choked his crying heart. Wehrfritz recognized this dumb lip-biting of feeling; however, he acted as if Albano had not understood him.

Now began the Viennite too, hurling about his fire-balls into all corners and niches of the Ministerial Vatican, merely to throw a favorable light upon his dancing and music scholars therein, as well as himself. Cannot the daughter of the Minister, hardly ten years old, speak all the modern languages and play on the harmonica, which Albano has never yet once heard, and even execute four-handed sonatas of Kotzeluch, and sing already like a nightingale, on boughs that have not yet put on their foliage too, and in fact passages from operas, which made her nightingale breast grow hollow, so that he had to leave? Yes, cannot her brother do far more, and has he not read out all the circulating libraries, particularly the plays, which he also performs on amateur stages into the bargain? And is he not at this precise hour making his case right good in to-day's masquerade ball, if he only meets there the object that inspires him? Wehmeier did wrong to sit opposite our jewel-humming-bird, Falterle, like a horned-owl or a bird-spider, ready to pluck and eat the humming-bird every minute. Verily, Falterle said nothing out of malice; he could not despise or hate anybody, because his mental eyes were so deeply buried in his own inflated "I," that he could not look with them at all out beyond his swollen self; he harmed no soul, and fluttered round people only as a still butterfly, not as a buzzing, stinging horse-fly, and sucked no blood, but only honey (i. e. a little praise).

"Pray, tell me, Mr. Von Falterle," said Wehrfritz, who, so soon as he had brought down this cold lightning-flash upon Albano, would no longer shoot cold and flying insinuations at him, "does the young minister sometimes sit on a bird-pole, like our Albano here?" That was too much for thee, tormented child! "No," said Albano, in a brassy tone, and with the friendliness of a corpse, which signifies another death to follow; and with an optical cloud of floating complexions, left the seat cracking under his dumb convulsions, and with clenched fingers went slowly out.

The poor young man had, to-day, since the apparent forgiveness of his Adamitish fall, and since the sight of the elegant new teacher, for whom he had so long rejoiced in hope, and whose fine copperplate encasement was just of a kind to have an imposing effect upon a child, cast off the last chrysalis-shell of his inner being, and promised himself high things. Some hand had within an hour snatched his inner man from the close, drowsy cradle of childhood,—he had sprung at once out of the warming-basket, had thrown stuffed-hat and frock far away from him,—he saw the toga virilis hanging in the distance, and marched into it, and said, "Cannot I, too, be a youth?"

Ah, thou dear boy! man, especially the rosy-cheeked little man, too easily cheats himself with taking repentance for reformation, resolutions for actions, blossoms for fruits, as on the naked twig of the fig-tree seeming fruits sprout forth, which are only the fleshy rinds of the blossoms!

And now, while all the nerves and roots of his soul lay naked and exposed to the harsh air, and with such fair, fresh impulses,—just now must he be so often trampled upon and disgraced. Honor burned in his bosom,—he determined to pass through the coming years as through a white colonnade of monumental pillars,—already a mere Alumnus from the city was, to his soul thirsting for glory and knowledge, a classic author,—and was he to endure it that the Director should falsely accuse, and the Vienna master caricature him to the Knight his father? Hard tears were struck, like sparks, from his proud, insulted soul, and the heat dissolved the comet nucleus of his inner world into a sweltry mist. In short, he resolved to run away to Pestitz in the night,—rush into his father's presence, tell him all, and then come home again without saying a word of it. At the end of the village he found a night-express, of whom he inquired the way to Pestitz, and who wondered at the little pilgrim without a hat.

But first let my readers look with me at the nest of the supper-party. This very express brought the Vienna master a bad piece of news touching the so-long-praised son of the Minister, whose name was Roquairol.

The above-mentioned female pupil of the Knight, the little Countess of Romeiro, was very beautiful: cold ones called her an angel, and enthusiastic ones a goddess. Roquairol had none of your Belgic veins, wherein, as in Saturn, all liquids lie as fixed, frozen bodies, but African arteries, in which, as in Mercury, melted metals run round. When the Countess was with his sister, he was always trying, with the common boldness of boys in high-life, to run his heart, filled with a venous system of quick matches, upon hers, as a good fireship; but she placed his sister as a fire-wall before her. Unfortunately she had gone, by chance, dressed as Werther's Lotta, to this evening's masquerade, and the splendor of her despotic charms was swallowed up and flashed round by eyes all darkly glowing behind masks: he took his inner and outer both off, pressed towards her, and demanded, with some haste—because she threatened to be off, and with some confidence, which he had won on the amateur-stage, and with pantomimic passionateness, which on that stage had always gained him the finest serenade of clapping hands—demanded nothing just now but reciprocal love. Werther's Lotta haughtily turned upon him her splendid back, covered with ringlets; beside himself, he ran home, took Werther's costume and pistol and came back. Then, with a physiognomical hurricane on his countenance, he stepped up before her and said, showing the weapon, he would kill himself here in the hall, if she rejected him. She looked upon him a little too politely, and asked what he wanted. But Werther, half drunk with Lotta's charms, with Werther's sorrows, and with punch, after the fifth or sixth "No!" (being already used to public acting,) before the whole masquerade, pointed the murderous weapon against himself, pulled the trigger, but luckily injured only his left ear-flap,—so that nothing more can be hung on that,—and grazed the side of his head. She instantly fled, and set out upon her journey, and he fell down, bleeding, and was carried home.

This story blew out many lamps in Falterle's triumphal arch, and lighted up many on Wehmeier's; but it set Albina at once into agony about her quite as wild mad-cap Albano. She asked after him in the kitchen, and the express-messenger helped her to a clew by his account of the boy without a hat. She hastened, herself, in her usual extravagance of anxiety, out through the village. A good genius—the yard-dog, Melak—had proved the antagonist-muscle and turnpike-gate of the fugitive. That is to say, Melak wanted to go too, and Alban chose rather that a patron and coast-guard so serviceable to the castle-yard, and who oftener warned away intruders than the night-watch did themselves, should go home again. Melak was firm in his matters: he wanted reasons,—namely, sticks and stones thrown at him; but the weeping boy, whose burning hands the cold nose of the good-natured animal refreshed, could not give him a hard word, but he merely turned the fawning dog right about, and said softly, Go home! But Melak recognized no decrees except loud ones; he kept turning round again; and in the midst of these inversions,—during which, in Albano's mind, always on a Brockenberg and seeing giant forms loom and glide through the clouds, his tears and every undeserved word burned deeper and deeper,—he was found by his innocent mother.

"Albano," said she, with a friendly but forced composure, "thou here in the cold night-air?" This conduct and language of the only soul which he had injured, took so strong a hold on his full soul, which needed a vent, whether in tears or in gall, that, with a spasmodic shock of his overstrained heart, he sprang upon her neck, and hung there, melted in tears. At her questions, he could not confess his cruel purpose, but merely pressed himself more strongly to her heart. And now came the anxious and penitent Director, too, following after, whom the child's situation had melted over, and said: "Silly devil! was my meaning then so evil?" and took the little hand to lead the way back again. Probably Albano's anger was exhausted by the effusion of love, and satisfied through the appeasing of his ambition; accordingly and immediately, strange to tell, with greater affection towards Wehrfritz than towards Albina, he went back with them, and wept by the way, merely from tender emotion.

When he entered the room, his face was as if transfigured, though a little swollen; the tears had washed away, as with a flood, his defiance, and drawn all his heart's soft lines of beauty upon his countenance, somewhat as the rain shows in transparent, trembling threads the heaven-flower (nostock), which does not appear in the sun. He placed himself in a posture of attention near his father, and kept his hand the whole evening, and Albina enjoyed in the double love a double bliss; and even on the faces of the servants lay scattered fragments of the third mock-rainbow of the domestic peace,—the sign of the covenant after the assuaging of the waters.

Verily, I have often formed the wish—and afterwards made a picture out of it—that I could be present at all reconciliations in the world, because no love moves us so deeply as returning love. It must touch Immortals, when they see men, the heavy-laden, and often held so widely asunder by fate or by fault, how, like the Valisneria,[34] they will tear themselves away from the marshy bottom, and ascend into a fairer element; and then, in the freer upper air, how they will conquer the distance between their hearts and come together. But it must also pain Immortals when they behold us under the violent tempests of life arrayed against each other on the battle-field of enmity, under double blows, and so mortally smitten at once by remote destiny and by that nearer hand which should bind up our wounds!