off before Lenz saw it, and swallowed
the bread steeped in her tears.

CHAPTER XXVII.
EVERYTHING GONE.

The Commissioners of Bankruptcy dragged everything into open day, and
then came to light all the "Lion's" secret doings. The Landlord then
appeared in all his iniquity.

In order to give security to people who, being strangers, were cautious
in their dealings with him, he had deliberately deceived those who were
connected with him, and dependent on him. Even his own postilions had
lost their hardly earned savings. Poor clockmakers went up and down the
village, complaining that the Landlord had robbed them of months and
years of their lives, and they would all have been ready to swear that
he was the most upright man in the whole country, far or near. The
Landlady fared no better, in spite of her affectation of entire
innocence. She had always made a great show in her house, and talked so
big, and been so condescending to everybody! The Landlord had only
deceived by his silence, and gloried in being called an honest man
right and left, and correct and accurate into the bargain.

Many of the creditors came to Lenz at the Morgenhalde; they were not
deterred by the distance; being in the village, at all events they
thought they had a right to see the whole extent of the misfortune. It
was from a mixture of compassion, and the wish to console him for his
still greater losses, that they all deplored that Lenz should have been
so shamefully taken in. Many comforted him by saying that perhaps he
would inherit from his uncle, and assured him that if he one day became
rich, they would ask no compensation from him,--indeed they had no
right to do so. Wherever Lenz was seen, he was pitied and condoled with
on the wickedness of his father-in-law, who had robbed his own son.
There was only one solitary individual who still spoke a good word for
the Landlord of the "Lion," and that was Pilgrim, and he did so
cordially; always maintaining, in Lenz's house, that the Landlord had
only been deceived in his calculations, that he had placed entire faith
in the success of his Brazilian speculation, which had failed, and that
he was not a bad man: this entirely won Annele's heart, for she had
always been very fond of her father. She did not hesitate openly to
admit that her mother was a hypocrite; and yet they were constantly
closeted together; and it was reported in the v