owed that she
would work as hard from temperament as he did from honor and necessity.

To see her brother and to spring to him were one and the same action:
"Charles, brother Charles, my second father," she cried throwing her
arms round his neck; but on looking closer at him, she pushed him away
from her, saying: "What's the matter? You've had some misfortune! What
is it?"

Before he had time to answer his sister's questions, her husband, Joseph
Nuessler, came in, and going up to Hawermann shook hands with him, and
said, taking as long to get out his words as dry weather does to come:
"Good day, brother-in-law; won't you sit down?" "Let him tell us what's
wrong," interrupted his wife impatiently. "Yes," said Joseph, "sit down
and tell us what has happened. Good-day, Braesig; be seated, Braesig."
Then Joseph Nuessler, or as he was generally called, young Joseph, sat
down in his own peculiar corner beside the stove. He was a tall, thin
man, who never could hold himself erect, and whose limbs bent in all
sorts of odd places whenever he wanted to use them in the ordinary
manner. He was nearly forty years old, his face was pale, and almost as
long as his way of drawling out his words, his soft blond hair, which
had no brightness about it, hung down equally long over his forehead and
his coat collar. He had never attempted to divide or curl it. When he
was a child his mother had combed it straight down over his brow, and so
he had continued to do it, and whenever it had looked a little rough and
unkempt, his mother used to say: "Never mind, Josy, the roughest colt
often makes the finest horse." Whether it was that his eyes had always
been accustomed to peer through the long hair that overhung them, or
whether it was merely his nature cannot be known with any certainty, but
there was something shy in his expression, as if he never could look
anything full in the face, or come to a decision on any subject, and
even when his hand went out to the right, his mouth turned to the left.
That, however, came from smoking, which was the only occupation he
carried out with the slightest perseverance, and as he always kept his
pipe in the left corner of his mouth, he, in course of time, had pressed
it out a little, and had drawn it down to the left, so that the right
side of his mouth looked as if he were continually saying "prunes and
prism," while the left side looked as if he were in the habit of
devouring children.

There he was no