ter, owing to whose activity, the guests find
everything in order at the earliest hour of the morning, and she
herself ready to have a pleasant talk.

In the midst of the household bustle, Lenz often looked up at his
mother's picture, as if saying to her: "Don't let your rest be
disturbed; her great delight is noise and tumult."

When Annele sat by him and watched his work, her restlessness seemed to
infect him. He was in the habit of looking intently at anything he had
finished, or was about to finish; and then he felt as if her eyes
followed each movement of his impatiently, and her thoughts were
involuntarily reproaching him for his slowness, and so he became
himself impatient and irritable,--so her vicinity did more harm than
good.

Little Wilhelm throve well on the Morgenhalde, and when a little sister
also came, the constant commotion in the house, was as if the spectre
huntsman and his followers were always passing through it. When Lenz
often complained of the incessant noise, Annele disdainfully replied,
"Those who want to have a quiet house should be rich and live in a
palace, where the princes each inhabit a separate wing."

"I am not rich," answered Lenz. He smiled at the taunt, and yet it
vexed him.

Two pendulums can only vibrate simultaneously, and with the same number
of strokes, when they are in a similar atmosphere, or at the same
distance from the centre of the earth.

Lenz became daily more quiet and reserved, and when he spoke to his
wife, he could not help being astonished that she found so much to say
on every point. If he chanced to say in the morning, "What a thick fog
we have to day!" she snapped him up instantly, saying: "Yes, and so
early in the autumn too, but we may have bright weather yet: we in the
hills can never depend on weather, and who knows which of us wants
rain, and which fine weather, just as it may suit best what we have to
do. If our good Lord were to suit the weather to the taste of
everybody," &c. &c.

There was a long discussion about every trifle,--how a waggoner had
been spoken to while his horses were getting a feed outside,--or a
passing stranger who wanted something to eat, and who, in spite of the
cover being quickly laid, had to wait a long time for dinner.

Lenz shrugged his shoulders, and was silent after such reproofs, indeed
he often scarcely spoke during the whole day, and his wife said
sometimes good-humouredly, and sometimes angrily: "You are a tiresom