ried for a time to blow the
spark into a flame: not succeeding, she put down the candle-stick, and
leaning upon my arm assured me that she could show me the way in this
manner too.

Then, without waiting for a remark from me, she took me with her into
the pitchy darkness. At first she spoke, to encourage me, and then began
to sing, perhaps to make me understand better; and felt with her hands
for the doors, and with her feet for the steps of the staircase.
Meanwhile I continually reflected: "this terrible malicious trifler is
plotting to lead me into some flour-bin, shut the door upon me, and
leave me there till the morning: or to let me step in the darkness into
some flue, where I shall fall up to my neck into the rising dough;--for
of that everything is full."

Poor, kind, good Fanny! I was so angry with you, I hated you so when I
first saw you!... And now, as we grow old....

I should never have believed that anyone could lead me in such
subterranean darkness through that winding labyrinth, where even in
broad daylight I often entirely lost my whereabouts. I only wondered
that this extraordinarily audacious girl could refrain from pulling my
hair as she led me through that darkness, her arm in mine, though she
had such a painful opportunity of doing so. Yes, I quite expected her to
do so.

Finally we reached a door, before which there was no need of a lamp to
assure a man of the room he was seeking. Through the door burst that
most sorrowful of all human sounds, the sound of a child audibly
wrestling with some unintelligible verse, twenty, fifty, a thousand
times repeated anew, and anew, without becoming intelligible, while the
verse had not yet taken its place in the child's head. Through the
boards sounded afar a spiral Latin phrase.

"His atacem, panacem, phylacem, coracem que facemque." Then again:

"His acatem, panacem, phylacem, coracem que facemque."

And again the same.

Fanny placed her ear against the door and seized my hand as a hint to be
quiet. Then she laughed aloud. How can anyone find an amusing subject in
a poor hard-brained "studiosus," who cannot grasp that rule, inevitable
in every career in life, that the second syllable of dropax, antrax,
climax "et caethra graeca" in the first case is long, in the second
short--a rule extremely useful to a man later in life when he gets into
some big scrape?

But Fanny found it extremely ridiculous. Then she opened the door and
nodded to me to follo