sappeared, none knew how or where, when envy and calumny
tried to ruin him; and if the members of the imaginative or romantic
school say that I am this Turnhaeuser, a spectral being, you may imagine
what I have to suffer at the hands of the solid and enlightened portion
of the community, the respectable citizens, and the men of business,
who think they have something better to do than to bother their heads
about poetry and romance. Then, even the aesthetic people want to watch
me and dog my steps, just as the doctors and the divines did in Johann
Georg's time, and try to embitter and spoil whatever little modicum of
an existence I am able to lay claim to, as much as ever they can. My
dear girl, I see well enough already, that though I take all this
tremendous interest in young Edmund Lehsen and you, and turn up at
every corner like a regular _deux ex machina_, there will be plenty of
people of the same way of thinking with those of the aesthetic school,
who will never be able to swallow me, historically speaking, who will
never be able to bring themselves to believe that I ever really existed
at all. So that, just that I might manage to get something like a more
or less firm footing, I have never ventured to say, in so many words,
that I am Leonard Turnhaeuser, the Goldsmith of the sixteenth century.
The folks in question are quite welcome to say, if they please, that I
am a clever conjurer, and find the explanations of every one of my
tricks (as they may style the phenomena and the results which I
produce) in Wieglieb's 'Natural Magic,' or some book of the kind. I
have still one more 'feat,' as they would call it, to perform, which
neither Philidor, nor Philadelphia, nor Cagliostro, nor any other
conjurer would be able to do, and which, being completely inexplicable,
must always remain a stumbling-block to the kind of people in question.
But I cannot help performing it, because it is indispensable to the
_denouement_ of this Berlinese tale of the Choice of a Bride by three
personages, suitors for the hand of Miss Albertine Bosswinkel. So keep
up your heart, my dear child, rise to-morrow morning in good time, put
on the dress which you like the best, because it is the most becoming
you happen to have; do your hair in the way you think suits you best,
and then await, as quietly and patiently as you can, what will happen."

He disappeared exactly as he had come.

On the next day--the Sunday--at eleven o'clock--the appoint