the crumbs of tidings I got from him, a
good, rough old faithful fellow, far past the age for sympathy, but he
had carried Ottilia when she was an infant, and meant to die in her
service. I thought him enviable above most creatures.

His principal anxiety was about my finding sleeping quarters. When he had
delivered himself three times over of all that I could lead him to say, I
left him still puffing at his pipe. He continued on guard to be in
readiness to run for a doctor, should one be wanted. Twice in the night I
came across his path. The night was quiet, dark blue, and starry; the
morning soft and fragrant. The burden of the night was bearable, but that
of daylight I fled from, and all day I was like one expecting a crisis.
Laughter, with so much to arouse it, hardly had any foothold within me to
stir my wits. For if I said 'Folly!' I did not feel it, and what I felt I
did not understand. My heart and head were positively divided. Days and
weeks were spent in reconciling them a little; days passed with a pencil
and scribbled slips of paper--the lines written with regular
commencements and irregular terminations; you know them. Why had Ottilia
fainted? She recommended hard study--thinks me idle, worthless; she has a
grave intelligence, a serious estimation of life; she thinks me
intrinsically of the value of a summer fly. But why did she say, 'We
change countries,' and immediately flush, break and falter, lose command
of her English, grow pale and swoon; why? With this question my
disastrous big heart came thundering up to the closed doors
of-comprehension. It was unanswerable. 'We change countries.' That is,
she and Miss Sibley change countries, because the English woman marries a
German, and the German princess--oh! enormous folly. Pierce it, slay it,
trample it under. Is that what the insane heart is big with? Throughout
my night-watch I had been free of it, as one who walks meditating in
cloisters on a sentence that once issued from divine lips. There was no
relief, save in those pencilled lines which gave honest laughter a
chance; they stood like such a hasty levy of raw recruits raised for war,
going through the goose-step, with pretty accurate shoulders, and feet of
distracting degrees of extension, enough to craze a rhythmical
drill-sergeant. I exulted at the first reading, shuddered at the second,
and at the third felt desperate, destroyed them and sat staring at
vacancy as if I had now lost the power of sp