ness in the arbor, the bright,
good-humored faces of the young people made him sad and angry. He
wondered whether it was all the invention of a painter, idealized and
false, or whether there were in reality somewhere such arbors and such
merry, carefree youths. Their smiling faces filled him with an envious
longing; the more he looked at the picture, the more he felt as though
he were looking for a moment through a small window into another world,
into a fairer country and the life of freer and more gracious men than
he had ever met in his life. He did not know into what strange kingdom
he was gazing, nor that his feelings were those of people who read
poetry, and get their pleasure in the beauty of the description from
the reflection how much smaller and meaner the every-day reality is,
passing into a slight, sweet sadness and longing. He did not well
understand how to extract the sweetness from this kind of sadness, and
so he shut the book, threw it angrily on the table, muttered a forced
"Good night," and went up to his room, where the moonlight lay on bed
and floor and chest and was reflected in the filled wash-basin. The
deep stillness, early as the hour was, the peaceful moonlight, and the
emptiness of the room, almost too large for a mere sleeping-chamber,
awoke in the rough old fellow a feeling of unbearable loneliness, from
which he escaped only after many muttered curses and some time later
into the land of slumber.

There followed days in which he sawed wood and enjoyed his afternoon
refreshment, alternating with days in which he was idle and did without
it. He often sat up there by the roadside, full of poisonous, malicious
thoughts, spitting down toward the town with all the bitterness of his
unrestrained heart. The feeling he had hoped for, of being at peace in
a safe haven, failed to visit him; instead, he felt himself sold and
betrayed, and either made violent scenes with the weaver or brooded
secretly in his own heart on the feeling of defeat and disgust and
ennui.

Meanwhile the term for which board had been paid for one of the
pensioners in private houses expired, and one day there came to the
"Sun" as a second guest, the former sailmaker, Lukas Heller.

While business reverses had made a drinker out of Huerlin, it was just
the opposite with Heller. Nor had he, like the manufacturer, fallen
suddenly from the height of showy riches; he had gone down slowly and
steadily, with the necessary pauses and