d over this a coarse red-and-blue
plaid shawl, and a cap which he had cut out himself from his old slouch
hat, whose rim had been nibbled and considerably diminished by his
white mice, one night when he had left the door of the cage open.

It is true, he still went regularly to the studio and shut himself in
under the pretense of laboring at some great, mysterious work; yet he
never touched a brush all day long, but cowered over the stove, in
which he managed to keep up a wretched little fire made out of
fragments of old fences that he had picked up here and there. There he
sat wrapped in his shawl, an unlighted cigar in his mouth, spying
around among his antiquities, to see which piece he should next tear
from his soul and deliver to the shop-keepers.

For a very considerable payment that he had to make had exhausted his
last penny of ready money. In his emotion over the martyrdom of the
faithful dog, Rosenbusch had determined to give Jansen a pleasant
surprise by ordering a grave-stone for the little mound in the garden,
bearing the following profound inscription:

Hic jacet Homo,
_Nihil humani a se alienum putans_.

It was merely a plain block of granite ornamented by a dog's head
cut in profile, and the letters were not even gilded. Yet the
stone-cutter's bill proved to be twice as large as the first estimate
of the cost; so that he had been obliged to sell the sword and scabbard
of a Walloon cuirassier, a rusty snaffle-bit of the time of the Swedish
war, and his last halberds; and besides this, to paint an oil-portrait
of the stone-cutter's wife, in order to complete this act of respect
without incurring any debts.

He never said a word about his troubles to any of his friends, not even
to Elfinger, and at the dedication of the monument, over which he
presided, he conducted himself with so much ease and dignity that they
all thought he had really found some unknown patron who advanced him
money on his great new picture. The fact that he appeared in a
dress-coat, in spite of the bitter winter cold, was attributed to the
formality with which he insisted upon treating the whole affair.

He himself tried hard at first to keep up his spirits. He composed an
account of the ceremony in his most feeling verses, and accompanied
them with a sketch of the grave-stone and other illustrations relating
to the dedication, and sent the document to Florence, where Jansen and
Juli