name. That was Herr
Carovius's cemetery, and those who were figuratively buried there were,
so far as he was concerned, dead, even though they were still going
about their earthly affairs as lively and cheerful as ever. They were
people whose mundane careers were finished, as he saw it, and under each
of their accounts, reckoned exclusively in sins, he had drawn a heavy
line. They were such people as Richard Wagner and his champions, the
local stationer to whom he had advanced some money years ago and who
entered a plea of bankruptcy a few months later, the authors of bad
books that were widely read, or of books which he loathed without having
read them, as, for instance, those of Zola.

There were still a third noteworthy section of the table, and that was
the so-called Academy. This consisted of a plot of ground, surrounded by
an iron fence, and divided up into twelve or fifteen square fields, each
of which was painted in fresh green. In the middle of each field there
was a wooden peg about two inches high, and to the middle of each peg
there was attached a name-plate. From the tops of some of these pegs
little banners of green cloth fluttered in the breeze.

The fact is, Herr Carovius had a weakness for association with
aristocrats. In his heart of hearts he admired the manners of the
aristocracy, their indifference and self-complacency, their irrefragable
traditions and their noiseless and harmonious behaviour. To the pegs of
the Academy he had affixed the names of some of the best families he had
known; among others, those of the Tuchers, the Hallers, the Humbsers,
the Kramer-Kleets, and the Auffenbergs. Whenever he had succeeded in
making the personal acquaintance of the members of any of these
families, he went straightway to the Academy and hoisted the appropriate
flag.

But, despite all his effort, he had never in the course of time been
able to run up more than three flags, and these only for a brief period
and without any marked success. Some one had recognised him on the
street or spoken to him at the concert, and that was all. The Academy
looked, in contradistinction to the jail and the cemetery, quite
deserted. Finally he was able to hoist the Auffenberg banner. Herr
Carovius felt that the Academy had a great future.

VIII

Kropotkin the painter had once upon a time received an order to make a
copy of a Holbein for Baron Siegmund von Auffenberg. He never finished
th