ty. Whereupon he
would cite the ancient races who had never known such an exaggerated
estimate of landscape Nature, and yet, for all that, had possessed the
five senses in enviable purity and perfection, and had been very
intellectual besides. It is true, they had not known the celebrated
"Germanic sentiment;" but there was every probability that the decline
of the arts dated from the uprisal and spread of this epidemic, for
which reason it was particularly out of place for artists to favor this
sort of _Berghuberei_ (as the Munichers call the country fever), with
the exception, of course, of those who get their living by it--the
landscape, animal, and peasant painters--a degenerate race of whom Fat
Rossel never spoke without drawing down the corners of his mouth.

But much as he liked to disparage German sentiment, he could not find
it in his heart to refuse the widow of the landscape-painter when she
offered him the house on the lake for a price that could hardly be
called low. Without any further inspection of the place he concluded
the bargain, and, without changing a muscle, quietly suffered the
malicious laughter which burst upon him from all sides to die out. "To
possess something," he said, calmly, "was not at all the same thing as
to be possessed by something." For that reason he would not need to
join in their raving, merely because he found himself among people who
were crazy and enraptured. And, true to his theory, whenever he was at
his villa he pursued his usual comfortable sybarite life, and
maintained that Nature had very great charms if one only looked at it
with one's back.

He had had the house, which was built in a rustic style, most
comfortably fitted up, with a great variety of sofas, rugs, and
easy-chairs, and always had this or that friend with him as a guest; so
that even the studio above the tree-tops, in which he himself never set
foot, was not altogether lost to its proper use. Heavenly repose, he
used to say, would not be nearly as sublime if there were not mortals
in the world to bestir themselves and cultivate the field of art with
the sweat of their brows.

Now, this year he had taken his aesthetical opposite, good Philip
Emanuel Kohle, out with him; had quartered him in the chamber to the
left of the little dining-room--he himself occupying the one on the
right--and it is almost unnecessary to add, had given him the exclusive
use of the studio. For the rest, they only met at dinner an