I.

Leipsic is a grim old town with no sentimental associations. Schiller,
to be sure, once lived there, but he had a bad time of it, in spite of
the slippers and things with which Dora and Minna Stock tried to
mollify his existence. The smoke which hangs over the Leipsic
chimney-tops is dense, prosaic smoke, which refuses to fashion itself
into fairy forms or airy castles in obedience to romantic fancy. Mr.
Leonard Grover actually swore (in Latin, of course, for he was too
well-mannered to swear in English), that it was the most irritating
and pestiferous smoke he had ever encountered since he left his native
town of Pittsburg, where a man, by the way, has a fine chance of
studying the effects of smoke both upon linen and temperament. Mr.
Grover was, however, cheerful by nature and refused to be permanently
depressed. He was in Leipsic for a practical purpose, and could not
afford to indulge in sentimental moods. And yet, in spite of his
determination to stick to his science and his laboratory practice, he
had unaccountable fits of loneliness, when from sheer despair he went
to call upon Professor Bornholm, to whom he had had a letter of
introduction and whose family had received him with much cordiality.
He would have liked to call upon somebody else occasionally, but the
fact was, during the six months he had been at the University he had
made no acquaintance outside of his student circle, except the
Bornholms. They seemed to like him so much that they refused to share
him with anybody else; they even refrained from introducing him to the
friends who might happen to call during his visits. Minchen, who was
the artistic daughter and made wax-flowers, usually found some way of
disposing of him when inconvenient callers of the gentler sex made
their appearance. She usually brought a fictitious message from the
Professor, who, having entrapped the young man into his study,
proceeded to bore him to death with oxalates and chlorides and
sulphuric acids.

Roeschen, the poetic daughter, whose slippers were a little down at the
heel, displaying to advantage the holes in her stockings, was wont to
employ her mother as an accomplice and, on some pretext or other,
lured the American into her garden, where there was the most
delightful privacy for sentimental confidences. Gretchen, the youngest
daughter, who was obliged to devote herself to domesticity, on account
of the inconvenient talents of her