y
poor. They played subordinate, but never immoral, parts now in any
troupe that would take them. They had broken with Gottsched, whose wife
was dead. One good friend, Dr. Loeber, remained, however. Dr. Loeber
gave the old couple a room, rent free, in Dresden. In the war of 1756,
Prussian soldiers, quartered in Dresden, slept in the same room with the
Neubers. But the soldiers treated the aged actress with the greatest
respect. Not an indecent word was ever uttered by them in her presence.
Not a pipe was ever laid upon her poor little writing table. When her
husband died in that over-crowded attic, Prussian soldiers bore him,
tenderly and reverently, to his grave.

In 1760 the city was bombarded. A shell crashed through the roof of the
room where old Madame Neuber lay ill. Dr. Loeber carried her for safety
to a suburban village. But the owner of the house to which she was
taken, when he found out who she was, refused to let an actress die
under his roof; so she was moved again, this time to a room in a cottage
nearby. From her bed she could see the vine-covered slopes of Pillnitz.
Dying, she folded her withered hands, and murmured: "I will lift up mine
eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help."

Her final exit from the troubled stage of earth was accomplished with
difficulty. The village pastor, determined that no actress should be
buried in the consecrated ground over which he held sway, locked the
churchyard gates and refused to yield up the key. Madame Neuber's coffin
was therefore hoisted over the wall and lowered into the grave by two or
three old friends. No prayer was spoken; no hymn was sung. But Caroline
Neuber's influence for good lives. She performed two great services: she
purified the German drama, and she introduced Lessing to the world.

In every time and clime, belles have danced and flirted and laughed and
chatted and been happy. Madame Johanna Schopenhauer, the famous mother
of her more famous philosopher son, Arthur, has left a pleasing
description of fashion's whimseys in the eighteenth century:

"We had no thin ball dresses, for the simple reason that thin varieties
of woven material had not then been invented. And yet we danced in our
cumbrous company gowns made of heavy silk we were passionately fond of
dancing. We were courted, admired, nay, even as much admired as our
granddaughters are now in their cloudlike, treacherously diaphanous
garments. How it happened, in our hideous disguises,