e soul that keeps an anniversary of
its own making keep it alone; look inwards for a few hours in the year
instead of always outwards; sit down at the long table d'hote of
memory, people it with the shadows of the past, and then set to and
make out the bill conscientiously. Such days as these my grandfather
always kept, and called his 'retreats.' He didn't prepare a banquet for
his friends, or pass the time in festivity at all; he simply sat down
and feasted his own soul and talked to her in that inner chamber which
she had occupied for five-and-seventy years. Even now I can trace, long
as it is since the dear old man was laid in the churchyard, the marked
passages in his Elzevir Horace which he always read on such days; and
as I read, I can see his large blue eyes wandering thoughtfully over
the yellow leaves of memory's book. He takes up his pen. Slowly and
hesitatingly he draws the black cross beneath the name of some dear
departed friend. 'The master is keeping his Retreat,' whispered the
servants to us, as we grandchildren were running gaily and noisily up
the stairs; and we repeated the words to each other, and imagined that
he was making himself Christmas presents, and wondered how he managed
to light up his own Christmas tree. And we were not far wrong. They
were the tapers of affection that he was kindling upon the tree of
Unforgetfulness, each taper the symbol of happy hours of a long life.
And when his hours of solitude were passed, and we were admitted in the
evening, he sat still and quiet in his chair as if he rejoiced like a
child in the Heaven-sent Christmas gifts of the past.

[Footnote 1: Schalttag, lit. 'intercalary day'--used of the 29th of
February in leap years--impossible to translate except by a
circumbendibus. Hence we have borrowed from ecclesiastical phraseology
a word which, to a certain extent, possesses the same meaning in
English. So far as we are aware Hauff is peculiar in using Schalttag in
this sense.]

And it was on his Retreat day that he was borne by loving hands to his
last resting-place. For the first time for many years, (for he had been
confined to his room,) it was 'out into the air,' but it was also 'into
his grave.' And again, 'I could not choose but weep they should lay him
in the mould.' I had often walked with him along the same road; but
when they turned off across the black bridge and laid him deep in
the earth, I knew that he was keeping his real Retreat. I was a li