led him very much. To cite only one insignificant
incident. We were both great readers, and, despite our sometimes arduous
work, contrived to get through a good amount of books in the year. One
evening he came home with a brand-new novel, in three volumes, in his
hands.

"Here, Friedel; here is some mental dissipation for to-night. Drop that
Schopenhauer, and study Heyse. Here is 'Die Kinder der Welt;' it will
suit our case exactly, for it is what we are ourselves."

"How clean it looks!" I observed, innocently.

"So it ought, seeing that I have just paid for it."

"Paid for it!" I almost shouted. "Paid for it! You don't mean that you
have bought the book!"

"Calm thy troubled spirit! You don't surely mean that you thought me
capable of stealing the book?"

"You are hopeless. You have paid at least eighteen marks for it."

"That's the figure to a pfennig."

"Well," said I, with conscious superiority, "you might have had the
whole three volumes from the library for five or six groschen."

"I know. But their copy looked so disgustingly greasy I couldn't have
touched it; so I ordered a new one."

"Very well. Your accounts will look well when you come to balance and
take stock," I retorted.

"What a fuss about a miserable eighteen marks!" said he, stretching
himself out, and opening a volume. "Come, Sig, learn how the children of
the world are wiser in their generation than the children of light, and
leave that low person to prematurely age himself by beginning to balance
his accounts before they are ripe for it."

"I don't know whether you are aware that you are talking the wildest and
most utter rubbish that was ever conceived," said I, nettled. "There is
simply no sense in it. Given an income of--"

"_Aber, ich bitte Dich!_" he implored, though laughing; and I was
silent.

But his three volumes of "Die Kinder der Welt" furnished me with many an
opportunity to "point a moral or adorn a tale," and I believe really
warned him off one or two other similar extravagances. The idea of men
in our position recklessly ordering three-volume novels because the
circulating library copy happened to be greasy, was one I could not get
over for a long time.

We still inhabited the same rooms at No. 45, in the Wehrhahn. We had
outstayed many other tenants; men had come and gone, both from our
house and from those rooms over the way whose windows faced ours. We
passed our time in much the same way--hard work at our profe