feel as if it was a whole year since I was so sad. We
have the good fortune to understand each other in the highest,
thoughts, and thought in the highest strain admits no measurement of
time."

"Ah yes," rejoined Manna, "in the very midst of all my sorrows the
thought has been present to me all day: 'Something is coming that will
give you joy.' Now I know what it was. You were the friend and
instructor of Roland; take me instead of him; be my friend and
instructor. Will you?"

She stretched out her hand to him, and both gazed at each other with a
look of joy.

"Ah, there sits your mother," cried Manna all at once; with a swift
step she hastened to the Professorin, and kissed her passionately.

The Professorin was astonished to see her. Is this the same maiden at
whose bedside she had sat the evening before, whose chilled hands she
had warmed, to whom she had spoken the words of encouragement? Youth is
an everlasting riddle.

Manna held her hand to her eyes for some time, and as she opened them
once more, she said:--

"Ah, if I only were the bird up there in the air!"

The mother made no answer, and Manna continued:--

"I see everything to-day for the first time; there is the Rhine,
there are the mountains, there the houses, there the men; a bird of
passage,--yes, one that has been hatched in Asia.--is coming towards
us, towards you. I am really so sorrowful, so sad; and still there is
something within me singing lustily and singing always; 'Thou art
merry, do not seek to be otherwise.' Ah, mother, it is dreadfully
sinful to be as I am."

"No, my child, you are still a child, and a child, they say, has smiles
and tears in the same bag. Rejoice that you are so young; perhaps
something of childhood has been repressed in you, and now it is coming
out. No one can say when, and no one can say where. We take things too
hard altogether; things are not quite so frightful as we women imagine.
I am quite cheerful since the Doctor was here. We may become accustomed
to look at everything in a gloomy way; then it is well if some one
comes and says: 'But just see the world is neither so wicked not so
good as we persuade ourselves it! is, and things run on either well or
ill, and not in their logical course.' My blessed husband said that
many and many a time."

Manna seemed not to have heard what the Mother said; she exclaimed in a
merry tone:--

"At this moment we are all ennobled, and still I do not perceive
anything