mpts a German to plant his garden-beds with big
glass globes for the sake of seeing miniature pictures of the view which
he can behold about him of a natural size; in the inquiring turn of mind
that sets a learned Teuton trudging three hundred miles in his gaiters
in search of a fact which smiles up in his face from a wayside spring,
or lurks laughing under the jessamine leaves in the back-yard; or (to
take a final instance) in the German craving to endow every least detail
in creation with a spiritual significance, a craving which produces
sometimes Hoffmann's tipsiness in type, sometimes the folios with which
Germany hedges the simplest questions round about, lest haply any fool
should fall into her intellectual excavations; and, indeed, if you
fathom these abysses, you find nothing but a German at the bottom.

Both friends were Catholics. They went to Mass and performed the duties
of religion together; and, like children, found nothing to tell their
confessors. It was their firm belief that music is to feeling and
thought as thought and feeling are to speech; and of their converse on
this system there was no end. Each made response to the other in orgies
of sound, demonstrating their convictions, each for each, like lovers.

Schmucke was as absent-minded as Pons was wide-awake. Pons was a
collector, Schmucke a dreamer of dreams; Schmucke was a student of
beauty seen by the soul, Pons a preserver of material beauty. Pons would
catch sight of a china cup and buy it in the time that Schmucke took to
blow his nose, wondering the while within himself whether the musical
phrase that was ringing in his brain--the _motif_ from Rossini or
Bellini or Beethoven or Mozart--had its origin or its counterpart in the
world of human thought and emotion. Schmucke's economies were controlled
by an absent mind, Pons was a spendthrift through passion, and for both
the result was the same--they had not a penny on Saint Sylvester's day.

Perhaps Pons would have given way under his troubles if it had not been
for this friendship; but life became bearable when he found some one to
whom he could pour out his heart. The first time that he breathed a
word of his difficulties, the good German had advised him to live as he
himself did, and eat bread and cheese at home sooner than dine abroad at
such a cost. Alas! Pons did not dare to confess that heart and stomach
were at war within him, that he could digest affronts which pained his
heart, and,