with
one of watchful cunning. Otherwise he disturbed nobody. Holdria often
kept him company, falling into step with him in his incessant
wanderings through the room, and answering to the best of his powers
the glances, gestures, and sighs of the restless rambler, always
fleeing before the evil spirits whom he could not escape because he
carried them with him. Since all his life he had loved to play a
deceiver's part and played it with varying luck, now he was condemned
to play through to a desperately sad end with his harlequin-like
manners. He played miserably and absurdly enough--but at least the role
corresponded to himself, and the former poseur now for the first time
came on the stage without his mask, not to his advantage. The
realization of the infinite and the eternal, the longing for the
inexpressible, innate in this soul as in others but neglected and
forgotten through a whole lifetime, found now, when it swelled up, no
outlet, and attempted to express itself in grimaces, gestures, and
tones of the strangest kind, absurdly and laughably enough. But there
was a real power behind it all; and the uncomprehending desire for
death was certainly the first great and, in the higher sense, rational
movement which this small soul had known for years.

Among the queer performances of a mind off the track was this, that
several times a day he crawled under his bed, brought out the old tin
sun, and offered it a foolish reverence. Sometimes he carried it
solemnly before him like a holy monstrance; sometimes he set it up in
front of him and gazed upon it with entranced eyes, sometimes he smote
it angrily with his fist, only to take it up tenderly the moment after,
caress it and dandle it in his arms before he restored it to its
hiding-place. When he began these symbolic farces, he lost what little
credit for intelligence remained to him among his housemates, and was
put down with his friend Holdria as an absolute imbecile. The sailmaker
especially regarded him with undisguised contempt, played tricks upon
him and humiliated him whenever he could, and was seriously annoyed
that Huerlin seemed to take so little notice of him.

Once he got the tin sun away from him and hid it in another room. When
Huerlin went to get it and could not find it, he roamed through the
house for a while, looking for it repeatedly in many different places;
then he addressed impotent threatening speeches to all the inmates, the
weaver not excepted;