or several years. And finally, strange places will make another
man of you, who will know better how to get round the apron-wearers.
You must learn to dance; that's already half the battle. And anyway,
the old Blue-coat has been asked by his cousin in Cologne to send one
of us to him; I read it the other day in a letter that had fallen out
of his pocket. Just tell him that you have gathered something of the
sort from several things he has said lately and that you are ready to
go if he wants you to. Or let me do that. You are too honest."

And he really did arrange it. It is a question whether our hero would
have been able voluntarily to make up his mind to leave home. He could
not understand how any one could live anywhere else but in his home
town; to him it had always seemed like a fairy tale that there were
other towns and people living in them. He had not imagined the life
and doings of these people as real, like those of the inhabitants of
his home, but as a kind of shadow-play that existed only for the
looker-on, not for the shadows themselves. His brother, who knew how
to treat the old man, led the conversation up to the cousin in Cologne
as if by chance, and was clever enough to interpret the suggestions
that Herr Nettenmair made in his diplomatic way as preliminary hints
and connect them with others that referred to our hero. After frequent
conversations he seemed to take it as the express desire of the old
man that Apollonius should go to his cousin in Cologne. This put the
idea into the old man's mind and, as it passed for his own, he brooded
over it in his own way. There was little work to do at the time, and
there seemed to be no prospect of its increasing materially for some
time. A pair of hands could be spared; if they remained in the
business all the workers would be condemned to semi-idleness. The old
man could stand nothing as little as what he called dawdling. The only
thing that was lacking was that our hero should resist. He knew
nothing of his brother's plans. The latter had wisely not initiated
him into them, because he knew him too well to expect his support in a
matter that he would have rejected as both underhand and disrespectful
to his father.

"You want to send Apollonius to Cologne," said his brother to the old
man one afternoon; "but will he want to go? I don't think so. You will
have to send me out on my travels. Apollonius won't go--at least not
today, nor tomorrow."

That was enough