e open mouth.
Eagerly the old man wet his pencil again, and wrote under the monster,
in large, legible letters, "This is Weaver Sauberle, the manager."

He was proposing to go through the whole book and deface and defile it
all. But the next picture arrested his attention, and he forgot himself
in studying it. It represented the explosion of a factory, and
consisted of little beyond a huge mass of smoke and fire, around and
above which whole or fragmentary human bodies, bricks, plaster, laths,
and beams were flying through the air. This interested him, and led him
into trying to reconstruct the whole story, and especially to imagine
how the victims must have felt at the moment of being hurled into the
air. There was a charm and a satisfaction in this for him which held
him intent on the picture a long time; with all his egoism, he belonged
to the numerous class who find more to think about in other people's
fate, especially when it is strikingly illustrated, than in their own.

When he had exercised his imagination sufficiently on this exciting
picture, he went on turning over the pages, and presently came to
another that arrested him, though in quite a different way. It was a
bright and cheerful picture--a pretty arbor, on the outer boughs of
which hung a star for a sign. On the star sat, with ruffled neck and
open beak, a little bird singing. Inside the arbor was to be seen,
about a rough rustic table, a small group of young men, students
or roving journeymen, who chatted and drank a good wine out of
cheerful-looking bottles. To one side of the picture was visible a
ruined castle raising its towers to heaven, and in the background a
fair landscape stretched away, as it might have been the Rhine valley,
with a river and boats and distant hills. The revellers were all
handsome youths, merry and amiable lads, smooth-faced or with light
youthful beards, who were evidently singing over their wine the praises
of friendship and love, of the good old Rhine and of God's blue heaven.

At first this engraving reminded the morose and lonely man who looked
at it of his own better days, when he, too, could call for a bottle of
wine, and of the many glasses of good sound stuff which he had
consumed. But by degrees the conviction stole over him that he had
never been as happy and gay as these young revellers, even long ago in
his light-hearted years of wandering, when he had taken the road as a
journeyman-locksmith. The summer glad