onger do
without him, although others held him cheap as being inferior to
them all, because he had had the small-pox and went about in the
coarsest and most thread-bare jacket. I almost think there was some
vanity in it. I seemed to myself to be a princess condescending to the
charcoal-burner; then again in my better hours I noticed that I had an
especial respect for him, more indeed than for any other human
creature, and that I never respected myself so much as when he had
given me a kind word.

"'Our years of childish play were nearly over; he was fifteen, I ten,
when a legacy came to his parents, not, indeed, enough to set them up
with carriage and horses, but to make them much more comfortable than
before. The father gave up the charcoal-loading business, and became--I
really do not quite know what--a sort of factor or agent. The eldest
son, my Hans Lutz, was sent off to a school for artisans; he was to be
an engineer, and was indeed made for it. His younger brother, who was
about my own age, remained at home and took to violin playing, in hopes
of gaining admission into the Ducal Chapel; they had a distant cousin
there who played the bassoon.

"'Time went on: at first I missed my companion dreadfully, I did
not know what to do with myself on Sundays, and found out fully how
much he had been to me. However, I gradually got accustomed to his
absence, to going about again dressed like a doll, to being serenaded
by the students who passed through the town, or to reading poems and
love-letters which were thrown in to me through the window, but which I
never answered. For my mother was pretty strict with me, and after my
first Communion, I was never allowed to leave the house alone. I
believe she was afraid that one of the mad Englishmen, who stared at me
worst of all, would carry me off, or that the Rhine water-sprites would
draw me down out of envy and spite. Now and then real wooers would make
their appearance, very respectable people, quite able to support a
wife. But they had a pretty reception! My father was not going to part
with me on such easy terms; he would hear of nothing under a Count, as
I overheard him telling my mother, or else a man so rich as to be able
to lay down my weight in money. It was all one to me, the privilege
that I enjoyed of being the beautiful Kate, and treated as the most
remarkable and important person in our district quite satisfied me, and
since the departure of Hans Lutz I did not s