Pickard Leberfink, who never laid aside
his sly smile, or ceased his soft giggle. In the midst of the beautiful
garden there was a very spacious pavilion; this too Master Wacht
opened, and stepping in remained standing in its centre; from every one
of its windows one obtained a different romantic view. "Yes," said
Master Wacht in a voice that bore witness to a heart well pleased with
itself, "here I am in my own property; this beautiful garden is mine. I
was obliged to buy it, not so much to augment my own place or increase
the value of my property, no! but because I knew that a certain darling
little thing longed so for these shrubs and trees, and for these
beautiful sweet-smelling flower-beds."

Then Nanni threw herself upon the old gentleman's breast and cried, "O
father! father! You will break my heart with your kindness, with your
goodness; do have pity"---- "There, there, say no more," Master Wacht
interrupted his suffering child, "be a good girl, and all may be
brought right in some marvellous way. You can find a great deal of
comfort in this little paradise"---- "Oh! yes, yes, yes," exclaimed
Nanni in a burst of enthusiasm, "O ye trees, ye shrubs, ye flowers, ye
distant hills, you beautiful fleeting evening clouds--my spirit lives
wholly in you all; I shall come to myself again when your sweet voices
comfort me." Therewith Nanni ran out of the open door of the pavilion
into the garden like a startled young roe; and Jonathan, the lawyer,
delayed not to follow her at his fastest speed, for no power would then
have been able to keep him back. Monsieur Pickard Leberfink requested
permission to show Rettelchen round the new property.

Meanwhile old Wacht had beer and tobacco brought to a spot under the
trees, close at the brow of the hill, whence he could look down into
the valley; and there he sat in a right glad and comfortable humour,
puffing the blue clouds of genuine Holland into the air. No doubt my
kindly reader is wondering greatly at this frame of mind in Master
Wacht, and is at a loss to explain to himself how a mood like this was
at all possible to a temperament like Wacht's. He had arrived, not so
much at any determined plan as at the conviction that the Eternal Power
could not possibly let him live to experience such a very terrible
misfortune as that of seeing his favourite child united to a lawyer;
that is, to Satan himself. "Something will happen," he said to himself;
"something must happen, by which