son
Bavaria grows green, and all is fresh and radiant. Outside the town all
the country is a sheet of cherry-blossom and of clover. Night and day,
carts full of merrymakers rattle out under the alders to the dancing
places amongst the pastures, or to the _Sommerfrischen_ of their country
friends. Whoever has a kreuzer to spend will have a draft of beer and a
whiff of the lilac-scented air, and the old will sit down and smoke
their painted pipes under the eaves of their favourite _Gasthof_, and
the young will roam with their best-loved maidens through the shadows of
the Anlagen, or still farther on under the high beech-trees of
Grosshesslohe.
_MOTHS._
The ear has its ecstasy as have other senses.
* * *
As there is love without dominion, so there is dominion without love.
* * *
When Fame stands by us all alone, she is an angel clad in light and
strength; but when Love touches her she drops her sword, and fades away,
ghostlike and ashamed.
* * *
Society only thought her--unamiable. True, she never said an unkind
thing, or did one; she never hurt man or woman; she was generous to a
fault; and to aid even people she despised would give herself trouble
unending. But these are serious, simple qualities which do not show
much, and are soon forgotten by those who benefit from them. Had she
laughed more, danced more, taken more kindly to the fools and their
follies, she might have been acid of tongue and niggard of sympathy; the
world would have thought her much more amiable.
* * *
"If she would only listen to me!" thought her mother, in the superior
wisdom of her popular little life. "If she would only kiss a few women
in the morning, and flirt with a few men in the evening, it would set
her all right with them in a month. It is no use doing good to anybody;
they only hate you for it. You have seen them in their straits; it is
like seeing them without their wig or their teeth; they never forgive
it. But to be pleasant, always to be pleasant, that is the thing. And
after all it costs nothing."
* * *
Marriage, as our world sees it, is simply a convenience; a somewhat
clumsy contrivance to tide over a social difficulty.
* * *
A sin! did the world know of such a thing? Hardly. Now and then, for
sake of its traditions, the world took some hapless boy, or some still
yet unhappier w
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