o rank
and position as another and was firmly determined never to allow
himself to be too little esteemed, even by a hair's breadth.

The Sun-Brothers had this too in common with other people, that they
experienced the greater part of their destinies and satisfactions,
their joys and sorrows, more in imagination than in tangible reality. A
humorist might indeed have considered the difference between the life
of these wrecks of humanity and that of busy citizens as consisting
only in imagination, since both alike carried on their large and small
affairs with the same busy gravity, and in the last resort an
unfortunate inmate of the poorhouse might possibly not be much worse
off in God's eyes than many a great and honored personage. But without
going as far as that, it might well be contended that for the easygoing
observer of life these Sun-Brothers were no unworthy object of
contemplation, since human life, even upon a small stage, always offers
an amusing drama and one well worth consideration.

The nearer the time approaches when the present generation will have
forgotten the name of the old "Sun" tavern and the Sun-Brothers, and
its poor and outcast members will be cared for in other places, the
more desirable it is that there should be a history of the old house
and its inmates. As a contribution to such a chronicle, these pages
will narrate something of the life of the first Sun-Brothers.

In the days when the present young men of Gerbersau were still wearing
short breeches or even dresses, and when over the door of the present
poorhouse there still swung proudly from the pink facade, at the length
of a wrought-iron arm, the tin sun which was its ensign, one day late
in autumn Karl Huerlin came back to his native town. He was the son of
Huerlin the locksmith in the Senfgasse, who was long since dead. He was
a little more than forty, and no one knew him any longer, since he had
wandered away as a very young man and had never since been seen in the
town. Now, however, he wore a good, neat suit of clothes, a moustache
and well-trimmed hair, a silver watch-chain, a stiff hat and a high
clean collar. He visited some of the former acquaintances of his family
and a few old school friends, and bore himself in general as a man who
had gone away and risen in the world, conscious of his value without
over-emphasis. Then he went to the town hall, exhibited his papers, and
declared that he intended to settle down in the place