tales by merely looking at the clouds and the sea. Would that this
accomplishment of the ancients had not gone from us and that the
moderns might write as the ancients by merely looking at the clouds
and the sea. Dr. Moehrlein was an upholder of the kommers. But his
wife, though German-born, behaved like a very Philistine and objected
to his constant and unwavering attendance upon these occasions of
intellectual uplift. For as the doctor added to the knowledge of the
world, he added to his weight. He had identified Brahma with the sun,
but had drunk his face purple in the intellectual effort. In his
search for the suggestions of the tale of Nala, he had acquired a
paunch very like a bag. Mrs. Moehrlein was accustomed to shrink from
the approach of the victim of the pursuit of knowledge. As for him, he
would have liked to caress and fondle her. To him there was always
present a remembrance of her early beauty and the golden mist of
memory shone before his eyes and he did not see that she was a heavy,
middle-aged woman with coarse features and coarse figure. Animal
beauty she had once had. The beauty had utterly flown, but the animal
all remained. She had a shifty and wandering eye, burned out and
lusterless, that told of dreams that were of men, men who these many
years had not included her husband, grotesque figure that he was, ugly
as a satyr in one of the myths suggested by the clouds and the sea.

It was a pleasant day of the last of May, in the mating season of
birds, when the world was warm and throbbing with young life. The
eminent Asiatic scholar looked across the lunch table, regarding his
wife with wistful sadness as she refreshed herself with boiled
cabbage.

"Do you know the day? It is thirty years since Hilsenhoff went into
the box; thirty years since we have been man and--woman."

"Ah, yes, this is the anniversary. Thirty years, thirty years. Poor
young Hilsenhoff."

She said these words with a tinge of sadness that was almost regret
and this did not escape the doctor.

"One might fancy you were sorry. Yet it was your own doing. I was
young and handsome then. A Hercules, young, full of life, late
champion swordsman of the university, a rising light in the realm of
learning, as well as a figure in society. You were the beautiful wife
of tutor Hilsenhoff, the buxom girl with the form of a Venus and the
passion of that goddess as well, tied to a thin, pallid bookworm ten
years your senior, neglecting his