top, good Rufinus, for the
breach effected in your flowery wall was intended against me and not
against you. There stands the hostile power, and I should be greatly
surprised if you did not recognize her as a neighbor?"

"Recognize her?" said the old man, whose wrath was quickly appeased. "Do
we know each other, fair damsel--yes or no? It is an open question."

"Of course!" cried Katharina, "I have seen you a hundred times from the
gnat-tower."

"You have had less pleasure than I should have had, if I had been so
happy as to see you.--We came across each other about a year ago. I was
then so happy as to find you in my large peach-tree, which to this day
takes the liberty of growing over your garden-plot."

"I was but a child then," laughed Katharina, who very well remembered
how the old man, whose handsome white head she had always particularly
admired, had spied her out among the boughs of his peach-tree and had
advised her, with a good-natured nod, to enjoy herself there.

"A child!" repeated Rufinus. "And now we are quite grown up and do not
care to climb so high, but creep humbly through our neighbor's hedge."

"Then you really are strangers?" cried Paula in surprise. "And have you
never met Pulcheria, Katharina?"

"Pul?--oh, how glad I should have been to call her!" said Katharina. "I
have been on the point of it a hundred times; for her mere appearance
makes one fall in love with her,--but my mother...."

"Well, and what has your mother got to say against her neighbors?" asked
Rufinus. "I believe we are peaceable folks who do no one any harm."

"No, no, God forbid! But my mother has her own way of viewing things;
you and she are strangers still, and as you are so rarely to be seen in
church...."

"She naturally takes us for the ungodly. Tell her that she is mistaken,
and if you are Paula's friend and you come to see her--but prettily,
through the gate, and not through the hedge, for it will be closely
twined again by to-morrow morning--if you come here, I say, you will
find that we have a great deal to do and a great many creatures to nurse
and care for--poor human creatures some of them, and some with fur or
feathers, just as it comes; and man serves his Maker if he only makes
life easier to the beings that come in his way; for He loves them all.
Tell that to your mother, little wagtail, and come again very often."

"Thank you very much. But let me ask you, if I may, where you heard that
odious nickna