passed since then, he
had left the apothecary shop only twice a year to take a holiday, and on
none of these occasions had he ever seen green trees, for his "outings"
as he called them, fell, according to his own wish, on the festival of
the "Three Kings" in January, and on the twenty-seventh of March which
was his saint's day, his name being Rupert.

Of the eighty holidays that lay behind him--all of which he had spent
in going to see a sister who was married to a miller and lived in
Gohlis--nine and thirty times it had rained, and forty-one times it
had snowed. In consequence of this "a walk in the fresh air" always
suggested to his mind, damp clothes, wet feet, ruined shoes, a cold
in the head, and an attack of indigestion--the result of his sister's
greasy cooking. His wife, too, preferred the inside of the city walls,
"where" as she was so fond of saying, "you know where you are."

Thus even in summer Herr Schimmel was always on hand to help the doctor,
nor had he cause to complain of being over worked, for the master seemed
as fond of a walk in the open air as the assistant was averse to one,
and when May came and the fruit trees were in blossom, when the delicate
green leaves of the beeches burst from the bud, and the oaks shed their
dry brown foliage in order to deck themselves out in young green, and
the dandelions embroidered the fields with gold and then sprinkled them
over with silver tissue, when the cowslips and daisies and violets and
their spring companions in purple and yellow appeared, and the larches
on the banks of the Pleisse turned green, when the nightingale sang and
rejoiced in the woods, then Doctor Melchior Ueberhell rarely spent a
sunny afternoon at home.

With his beautiful young wife on his arm he wandered through the lovely
Laubwald--that precious possession of the city--and though he had often
said while in Italy, where it is dryer and the foliage sparser than in
Germany, that there was nothing so beautiful as the abounding brooks and
the dense greenery of his native forests, it gave him sincere joy, that
spring, to have his opinion confirmed and to see that his dearly loved
wife cared as much for the German woods as he did.

When in their walks they encountered other burghers, all eyes rested on
the handsome pair, for if Melchior were thin, his figure was tall and
his features good, and there was a strange charm in his big, dark,
eyes that seemed to find more in the woods than was vis