thic fountain
stood. There he stood still before a house, a narrow, simple house,
like many others, with an openwork gable of curving lines, and became
lost in contemplation of it. He read the name-plate on the door, and
let his eyes rest a while on each window. Then he turned slowly away.

Whither was he going? Homeward. But he chose a roundabout way, taking a
walk out beyond the gate, for there was plenty of time. He went across
the Mill Rampart and the Holsten Rampart, holding his hat firmly
against the wind that creaked and groaned in the trees. Then he forsook
the park strip along the ramparts not far from the station, watched a
train puff by in clumsy haste, counted the cars to pass the time, and
looked after the man who sat perched high on the last one. But he came
to a stop on the square with the lindens before one of the pretty
villas that stood there, looked long into the garden and up at the
windows, and finally took a notion to swing the garden-gate back and
forth and make the hinges screech. Then he contemplated for a time his
hand, which had become cold and rusty, and went on, through the old
square-built gate, along the harbor, and up the steep, draughty, and
wet Gable Street to the house of his parents.

Closed in by the neighboring houses which its gable overtopped, it
stood there gray and forbidding as for these three hundred years past,
and Tonio Kroeger read the pious legend that was above the door in half
effaced letters. Then he drew a deep breath and went in.

His heart beat fearfully, for he half expected his father might issue
from one of the doors on the ground floor past which he was walking,
his father in office coat and with a pen behind his ear, who would stop
him and sternly call him to account for his extravagant life,--which
censure he would have found quite proper. But he got past the doors
unmolested. The storm door was not shut, but only pulled to, which he
considered censurable, while at the same time he felt as in certain
light dreams, when hindrances vanish of themselves before us and we
press forward unchecked, favored by wonderful good fortune ... The
spacious hall, paved with large square slabs of stone, echoed to his
tread. Opposite the kitchen, where all was still, the strange, clumsy,
but neatly varnished partition-rooms jutted out from the wall at a
considerable height; these were the servants' rooms, which could only
be reached by a sort of open staircase from the hall fl