my internal maladies which you can't see? _Thank_
you!' Well, Charles, from that moment I lost all faith in the
water-doctor, and without faith they can do nothing as they themselves
tell you when it comes to the point. So I went away quietly and got old
Metz, the surgeon at Rahnstaedt, to draw out the stings. That was the end
of the water-cure; still it's a good thing; one gets new ideas in a
place like that, and even if one's gout is not cured, one gains some
notion of what a human being can suffer. And now, Charles, this is a
water-book I have brought you, you can study it in the winter-evenings."

[Three more years had passed, and Louisa Hawermann at the parsonage was
repaying her father's and her foster parents' love and care by growing
up the loveliest girl of the neighborhood. Uncle Braesig, to be sure,
would have qualified this by saying "next to his two round-heads." No
qualification, however, was justified in the eyes of Frank von Rambow
and Fred Triddelfitz, the two young men studying agriculture under
Hawermann. They fell in love with her, each after his own fashion. Frank
deeply and lastingly, Fred--whom uncle Braesig loved to call the "gray
hound"--ardently if not irretrievably. This, however, he did not know,
and as he felt his blood seething, he was thoroughly wretched.]

No human being can stand more than a certain amount of pain, after that
it becomes unbearable and a remedy must be found; now the only remedy a
lover finds effectual is an interview with his sweetheart. Matters had
come to such a pass with Fred that he could no longer exist without
seeing Louisa, so he began to lie in wait for her in all sorts of holes
and corners. Every hollow-tree was a good hiding-place from which he
could watch for her coming, every ditch was of use in concealing his
advance, every hill was a look-out from which he could sweep the country
with his gaze, and every thicket served him for an ambush. He was so
much in earnest that he could not fail to succeed in his attempts to see
her, and he often gave Louisa a great fright by pouncing out upon her,
when she least expected him, and when she was perhaps thinking of * * *
we will not say Frank. Sometimes he was to be seen rearing his long
slight figure out of a bush like a snake in the act of springing,
sometimes his head would appear above the green ears of rye like a seal
putting its head above water, and sometimes as she passed under a tree
he would drop down at her