of day. But the luminary after
which the Sun-Brothers had been named had long ceased to shine in any
sky; it was only the sign of a miserable tavern which had vanished
several years before. Both sign and fame had disappeared, for the
building served later as the city poorhouse, still harboring, indeed,
numerous guests who had lived to see the setting of the sun taken down
from the sign, and had acquired at its bar the reversion of their
present shelter and guardianship.

[Illustration: HERMANN HESSE]

The small house stood last in the steep lane and in the town, close to
this sunny strip of turf. It offered a warped and weary front to the
eye, as though it was a considerable effort to stand upright, and had
nothing now about it to show how much merriment and cheerful clinking
of glasses, joking and laughter it had seen, to say nothing of lively
brawls and knife-play. Since the old pink paint of the front had grown
pale and peeled off in cracked patches, the ancient abode of vagabonds
corresponded accurately in its external appearance to its purpose,
which is not always the case with municipal buildings in our day.
Plainly and honestly, even eloquently, it gave every one to understand
that it was a refuge for those who had made shipwreck of their lives
and been left behind in the race, the desperate end of a narrow
backwater from which no plans or hidden resources could ever work them
out again into the stream of life.

Fortunately, little of the melancholy of such reflections was to be
found in the circle of the Sun-Brothers. Rather, they--most of
them--went on living after the fashion of their bygone days, puffed up
their petty bickerings and fancies and amusements, friendships and
jealousies, to the dimensions of weighty events and affairs of state,
and took not each other but themselves as seriously as possible. In
fact, they behaved as if it was only now, since they had extricated
themselves from the noisy streets of the bustling world, that the chase
was beginning; they carried on their insignificant affairs with a
gravity and a tenacity which for the most part they had never been able
to attain in their earlier activities. Like many another small
collection of men, although they were ruled on the principles of
absolute monarchy by the head of the institution and treated as mere
imaginary existences without rights, they believed themselves to be a
small republic, in which every free citizen had the same title t