clock in the public room
struck the hour noisily and admonishingly, the weights rattled angrily,
but Lenz did not hear. The landlord was the only other person in the
room, his wife having long since gone to bed. He left his seat at the
adjoining table, where he had been reading the paper, and signed to
Annele to put up her work. She could not have understood him, for she
went on talking eagerly. He put out his light with a clatter, but even
that failed to rouse the pair. He walked up and down the room in his
creaking boots; Lenz paid no attention. Never before had the landlord's
presence been thus ignored. He struck his repeater; Lenz gave no heed.
At last--for mine host was not accustomed to put restraint upon himself
for any man--he spoke: "Lenz, if you mean to spend the night here, I
will show you a room."

Lenz roused himself, shook hands with Annele, and would have liked to
do the same with the landlord; but that was too great a liberty to take
unless invited. Revolving many thoughts in his mind, he left the house,
and silently took his way homeward.

CHAPTER XIII.

LION, FOX, AND MAGPIE.

In the early winter, as in the early spring, the Morgenhalde was the
pleasantest place in the whole country. Old Lenz was right in saying
that the morning sun lay on his house and meadow all day long. But
little fire was needed half the day. Flowers blossomed in the garden
behind the house long after they had disappeared everywhere else, and
put out their leaves again in the spring, when everything else was
bare. This garden was as sheltered as a room, and in it grew, what was
rare in those parts, a chestnut-tree, which attracted many an unwelcome
squirrel and nutpecker from the neighboring forest. The house protected
the garden on one side without keeping from it the sun after ten
o'clock; and the mighty forest which covered the upper part of the
steep mountain seemed to take special pleasure in both house and
garden, and had stationed two of its tallest pines as sentinels at the
gate.

Had there been many promenaders in the town, they certainly, in these
first chilly winter months, would have often taken the path up the
meadow, past Lenz's house into the wood, and returned along the
mountain ridge. But there was only one promenader, or rather there were
only two, in the town,--Petrovitsch and his dog Bubby. Every day before
dinner Petrovitsch got up an appetit