cap, which had
fallen off, on again, arranged the false beard, and sate himself down
opposite to Aennchen upon a pile of folio volumes.

"My daughter," he said, "my daughter Anna; what were your sensations?
Describe your thoughts, your feelings? What were the forms seen by the
eye of the spirit within your inner being?"

"Ah!" answered Anna, "I was so happy; I never was so happy in all my
life. And I thought of Amandus von Nebelstern. And I saw him quite
plainly before my eyes, but he was much better looking than he used to
be, and he was smoking a pipe of the Virginian tobacco that I sent him,
and seemed to be enjoying it tremendously. Then all at once I felt a
great appetite for young carrots with sausages; and lo and behold!
there the dishes were before me, and I was just going to help myself to
some when I woke up from the dream in a moment, with a sort of painful
start."

"Amandus von Nebelstern, Virginia canaster, carrots, sausages," quoth
Herr Dapsul von Zabelthau to his daughter very reflectively. And he
signed to her to stay where she was, for she was preparing to go away.

"Happy is it for you, innocent child," he began, in a tone much more
lamentable than even his usual one, "that you are as yet not initiated
into the profounder mysteries of the universe, and are unaware of the
threatening perils which surround you. You know nothing of the
supernatural science of the sacred cabbala. True, you will never
partake the celestial joy of those wise ones who, having attained the
highest step, need never eat or drink except for their pleasure, and
are exempt from human necessities. But then, you have not to endure and
suffer the pain of attainment to that step, like your unhappy father,
who is still far more liable to attacks of mere human giddiness, to
whom that which he laboriously discovers only causes terror and awe,
and who is still, from purely earthly necessities, obliged to eat and
drink and, in fact, submit to human requirements. Learn, my charming
child, blessed as you are with absence of knowledge, that the depths of
the earth, and the air, water, and fire, are filled with spiritual
beings of higher and yet of more restricted nature than mankind. It
seems unnecessary, my little unwise one, to explain to you the peculiar
nature and characteristics of the gnomes, the salamanders, sylphides,
and undines; you would not be able to understand them. To give you some
slight idea of the danger which you may be