so that in the end he could buy whatever happened to please his fancy.
He willingly assisted his son-in-law in declaring a fraudulent
bankruptcy, and perhaps even beguiled him into it, but when the latter,
after having perjured himself, demanded the embezzled goods back again,
he laughed him to scorn and dared him to go to law. However he was
surprised by his own maid-servant while committing arson and taken in
the very act, in spite of his cleverness and his equally great luck, and
it was to this circumstance that my father, who had been talked into
going security by all sorts of cunning deceptive promises, owed the few
years of quiet possession which he enjoyed during his short lifetime.

As soon as the penitentiary had given its charge back to the community
we were obliged to leave the abode in which our grandparents had shared
joy and sorrow for over half a century. It seemed like the end of the
world to my brother and myself when the old pieces of furniture, which
up till then had scarcely been moved from their places even when the
rooms were whitewashed, suddenly emigrated into the street; when the
respectable old Dutch striking-clock that never went correctly and
always caused confusion, all at once found itself hanging on a branch of
the pear tree, brightly illuminated by the beams of the May sun, while
under it stood insecurely the round worm-eaten dining-table which, when
there happened to be very little on it, had so often elicited from us
the wish that we could have everything that had ever been eaten off it.
However, the whole affair was also, quite naturally, in the nature of a
spectacle for us, and as in the course of clearing out, a bright colored
pipe-head that I had lost a long time before came to light again in some
rat hole or other, and, moreover, various odds and ends, which the other
families who were moving out with us had come across when dusting in the
corners and did not consider worth taking along, fell to our share--since
we could make use of the least thing--the day soon began to seem like a
holiday. We parted, not indeed without emotion but still without sorrow,
from the house in which we had been born.

I did not learn what it really meant until later, though to be sure it
was soon enough. Without realizing it myself I had, up to that time,
been a little aristocrat, and now ceased to be one. This is how it was.
In the same way that the peasant proprietor and the rich burgher look
down Ho