cared for as in his own house. One day, when there
were sixteen different tables in the large public room, Lenz told
Annele it was like a well frequented marketplace.

"You are witty," said she. "I must tell my father that--it will amuse
him."

"Don't do that. What I say to you, I don't intend to go farther."

Lenz was overflowing with happiness. He went backwards and forwards
along the distant, and almost impassable road, just as if he had been
passing from one room to another. He was often congratulated on his way
by different people; and many said--"Don't think us impertinent, but we
never believed that Annele would stay in this village. It was always
said she would marry a landlord in Baden-Baden, or the Techniker. You
may laugh, but you have fallen on your feet."

Lenz was not at all offended by being considered inferior to Annele; on
the contrary, he was proud that she was so modest in her views as to
choose him. When Lenz was sitting in the back parlour with Annele and
her mother, and the old man sometimes came in, uttering some pious
sentiment in his deep, sonorous voice, Lenz would say--"How grateful I
ought to be to the good Lord, who has given me parents again! and such
parents too! I seem to have come into the world a second time. I can
scarcely realize that I am actually at home in the 'Lion' Inn, when I
remember what I thought when, as a child, I saw the upper storey built,
and plate glass in all the windows! I am sure the Palace at Carlsruhe
cannot be finer, we children used to say to each other. And I was
standing by when the Golden Lion itself was hung up. I little thought,
then, that the day would come when I should be quite at home in such a
palace! It is hard that my mother did not live to see it!"

The two women were touched by these words, although Annele did not
leave off counting the stitches in a pair of slippers that she had
begun to work for Lenz. Neither of them spoke for some little time,
till the mother said--"Yes! besides, what first-rate connections you
will have in my other two sons-in-law. I told you already that I love
and respect them, but differently from you, I have known you from the
time you were a child, and I feel towards you as if you had been my own
flesh and blood. But you have seen them, and know what well bred,
genteel young men they both are--and men of business, into the bargain.
Many a one would be glad, if they had as much capital as they make in a
single year."