end was still in the land of the living. A
large market-basket stood in the middle, provided with a long paper
label such as they put on medicine-bottles; and on it were written
these words:

"A REMEDY FOR BEARDLESS ARTISTS.
TO BE TAKEN ACCORDING TO THE NECESSITIES
OF THE CASE.
FROM THE ESTABLISHMENT OF
THE LEATHER GLOVE."[3]

There was nothing in the basket but the sketch-book, in which the
solitary outcast had written his lamentations the night before.

The actor had not yet finished reading the last strophes when the door
opened, and Rosenbusch solemnly entered, with such an indescribably
mournful expression upon his face that it was impossible to look at him
without laughing. As soon as he saw that Elfinger was once more capable
of appreciating the humor of the situation, it was easy to perceive
that a weight was lifted from his heart. He stepped hastily up to his
friend, and, giving him both his hands, cried:

"Drink to the lost, O stranger,
And pray for his poor soul!"

the final words of his own verses.

"But come, brother," he continued, "let us rise superior to our fate,
and although our manly spirit may not forbid us to shed a tear--

"So it is all over, and there is no more hope?" interrupted Elfinger,
shutting up the sketch-book.

"Over and gone forever! unless I should change my course in my old age
and become a cattle-painter, or should crawl back into the womb so as
to be born again as a pupil of Piloty. Just conceive it, Roscius! Only
yesterday, hardly an hour before I paid my visit to papa, this brave
Theban had fallen into the hands of a good friend at the art-club, who
had stuffed him with a long account of the wonderfully flourishing
financial condition of art in our good city of Munich. A flock of
sheep, that had just been sold for eight thousand gulden, and the
vivisection of a rabbit by some Hungarian or Pole whom that magician
Piloty had developed into a celebrated man in six months, and whose
pictures are now sold for unheard-of prices before they leave the
easel, had given the two Philistines a chance to air their aesthetics,
which are as irrefutable as mathematics. Figures show this. The export
of painted canvas from this city, which has attained a gigantic height
during the last few years, even surpassing the export of tanned
leather,