nstruments under our cloaks and the
world before us."

I can't tell how it was, but, while he spoke, the thought that such
learned people were so forlorn and forsaken in this world went to
my very heart. And then I thought of myself, and how I was not much
better off, and the tears came into my eyes. The cornetist eyed me
askance. "I wouldn't give a fig," he went on, "to travel with horses,
and coffee, and freshly-made beds, and nightcaps and boot-jacks, all
ordered beforehand. It's just the delightful part of it that, when
we set out early in the morning, and the birds of passage are winging
their flight high in the air above us, we do not know what chimney is
smoking for us today, and can never foresee what special piece of luck
may befall us before evening." "Yes," said the other, "and wherever we
go, and take out our instruments, people are merry; and when we play
at noon in the vestibule of some great country-house, the maids will
dance before the door, and their masters and mistresses will have the
drawing-room door opened a little, the better to hear the music, and
the clatter of plates and the smell of the roast float out through the
chink, and the young misses at table well-nigh twist their necks off
to see the musicians outside." "That's true!" exclaimed the cornetist,
with sparkling eyes. "Let who will pore over their compendiums, we
choose to study in the vast picture-book which the dear God spreads
open before us! Yes, the gentleman may believe me, we make the right
sort of fellows, who know how to preach to the peasants from the
pulpit and to bang the cushion, so that the clodpoles down below are
ready to burst with humiliation and edification."

At hearing them talk thus, I became so pleased and interested that I
longed to be a student too. I could have listened forever, for I enjoy
the conversation of men of learning, from whom much is to be gained.
But we had no real, sensible conversation, for one of the students
was worried because the vacation was so nearly at an end. He put his
clarionet together, set up a sheet of music on his knees, and began to
practice a difficult passage from a mass which was to be played when
they returned to Prague. There he sat and fingered and played away,
sometimes so false that it fairly pierced your ears and you couldn't
hear your own voice.

Suddenly the cornetist exclaimed in his bass tones, "I have it!" and
down came his fist on the map before him. The other stoppe