clean gone and utterly abolished. Well, and if it was
so, it was a blank prospect for him, but the earth was well rid of her;
and for herself, it was a higher fate to be assimilated into the body of
Reineke than to remain in a miserable individuality to be a layer of
carrion crows' eggs.

And then for Bellyn, and for Bruin, and for Hintze, and the rest, who
would needs be meddling with what was no concern of theirs--what is
there in them to challenge either regret or pity? They made love to
their occupation.

'Tis dangerous when the baser nature falls
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites:
They lie not near our conscience.

Ah! if they were all. But there is one misdeed, one which outweighs all
others whatsoever--a crime which it is useless to palliate, let our
other friend say what he pleased; and Reineke himself felt it so. It
sate heavy, _for him_, on his soul, and alone of all the actions of his
life we are certain that he wished it undone--the death and eating of
that poor foolish Lampe, the hare. It was a paltry revenge in Reineke.
Lampe had told tales of him; he had complained that Reineke, under
pretence of teaching him his Catechism, had seized him and tried to
murder him; and though he provoked his fate by thrusting himself, after
such a warning, into the jaws of Malepartus, Reineke betrays an
uneasiness about it in confession; and, unlike himself, feels it
necessary to make some sort of an excuse.

Grimbart, the badger, Reineke's father confessor, had been obliged to
speak severely of the seriousness of the offence. 'You see,' Reineke
answers:--

To help oneself out through the world is a queer sort of business:
one can not
Keep, you know, quite altogether as pure as one can in the cloister.
When we are handling honey we now and then lick at our fingers.
Lampe sorely provoked me; he frisked about this way and that way,
Up and down, under my eyes, and he looked so fat and so jolly,
Really I could not resist it. I entirely forgot how I loved him.
And then he was so stupid.

But even this acknowledgment does not satisfy Reineke. His mind is
evidently softened, and it was on that occasion that he poured out his
pathetic lamentation over the sad condition of the world--so fluent, so
musical, so touching, that Grimbart listened with wide eyes, unable,
till it had run to the length of a sermon, to collect himself. It is
true that a