on the
man who had emerged like a pike from the floods. The suitors looked
extremely impatient. Beate's eyes were fastened longingly on the
stranger, as if he were cutting the bread of life for her. To be sure,
it seemed rather crusty and brittle--but there was something there that
had a nourishing flavor.

The stranger's nose had a peculiar shape. It was a nose that seemed
somehow rather lonely in the middle of the face with its prominences
and depressions. Oh, quite a respectable nose, if one did not make too
many claims for beauty on its behalf. It had, as it were, broken away
from its companion features; but it seemed somehow to have great
affinity and sympathy with the inner being of the stranger. There was
something pugnacious about his manner of expressing himself, about his
whole bearing and every gesture he made.

"May one ask," began little Madame Kummerfelden, in her charming
flowered dress and from under her big cap, "where the gentleman has
come from, and where he is purposing to go?"

"I was purposing to pay a visit to your town down there and see your
old man."

"The Duke--"

"No."

"His Excellency?" said Frau Kummerfelden in a very polished tone which
she enjoyed producing. She knew well how to speak to and of people of
rank.

"His Excellency!" said the stranger harshly. "That's the end of
it--now you've spoiled the whole thing for me. Now I might just as well
turn round and go back the way I came. I come from the Harz country,
from one of the many little unknown corners of the earth; and since I'd
passed my life among the animals that are called men in those parts, I
wanted just once to see the real man who said 'The whole misery of
humanity seizes upon me'--and other things like that. I knew it--but
now I hear it. 'His Excellency!' Wonderful! And how beautifully you
said it, my dear lady. One could see him standing stiffly before one.
And I wanted to go in and take him by the hand and say, 'God, I thank
Thee that for once Thou hast created something rational, so that people
may believe in Thee with a good conscience--for most of Thine images
here on earth--well, I don't want to be disrespectful, but really ...!'
No, what I was wanting doesn't fit in with bows and ante-chambers. He
ought to walk perfectly naked, your 'Excellency,' under grand, lofty
trees, on the solemn bare ground!"

"You seem, my dear sir," said the courtier in measured tones, "to have
a peculiar conception of his Excelle