to be
thankful for!"

"But he was stealing--" Huerlin began to shout, almost crying with rage
and injured dignity, only to be instantly interrupted and ordered to
keep quiet. The he-goats retreated muttering to their beds; the weaver
listened a few moments at the door, and when he had gone all was still
in the room. By the wash-basin the fragments of the cigar lay on the
floor; the pale summer night peeped in at the window, and over the two
old rogues in their deadly hatred hung the flower-bedecked text,
"Little children, love one another."

Huerlin extracted at least a minor triumph out of the affair the next
day. He steadfastly refused any longer to share the same room with the
sailmaker; and after a stubborn resistance the weaver was obliged to
give in and assign Heller another room. So the manufacturer once more
became a hermit; and glad as he was to be rid of the sailmaker's
company, it preyed on his spirits to such an extent that he realized
fully for the first time into what a hopeless _cul de sac_ fate had
thrust him in his old age.

The poor old man could make no cheerful prognostications. Formerly,
however badly things went, he had at least been free; even in his most
miserable days he had had a few pennies to spend at the tavern, and
could set out on his wanderings again whenever he chose. Now he sat
there, stripped of all rights and under discipline, never saw a copper
that he could call his own, and had nothing before him in the world
except to become older and feebler and, when his time came, to lie down
and die.

He began to do what he had never done before--to look up and down from
a high point of vantage on the Allpach road, over the town and along
the valley; to measure the white high-roads with his eye, and watch the
soaring birds and the clouds; to follow longingly with his eye the
passing wagons and the pedestrians that went up and down, as a mourning
exile from their company, left behind never to join them in their
journeys. To pass the evenings, he accustomed himself now to reading;
but from the edifying histories of the almanacs and pious periodicals
he often raised a distant and depressed eye, feeling that he had
nothing in common with such people and events, recalling his young
days, Solingen, his factory, the prison, the joyous evenings in the old
"Sun," and coming back always to the thought that now he was alone,
hopelessly alone.

Heller, the sailmaker, cast sidelong and malicious gl