of it. I had begun to think you had gone on home, and was vexed ..."

At these words Tonio's entire being began to leap and shout.

"Why, then we'll go over the ramparts now," he said with agitated
voice. "Over the Mill Rampart and the Holsten Rampart, and then I'll
take you home that way, Hans ... Why no, it doesn't matter if I go home
alone then; next time you'll go with me."

At bottom he did not believe very completely in what Hans had said, and
he felt distinctly that the latter assigned only half as much
importance to this walk as he. But yet he saw that Hans regretted his
forgetfulness and was making it a point to conciliate him. And he was
far from wishing to impede the conciliation.

[Illustration: THOMAS MANN]

The fact was that Tonio loved Hans Hansen and had already suffered much
for his sake. He who loves most is the weaker and must suffer--this
simple and bitter doctrine of life his fourteen-year-old spirit had
already accepted; and he was so constituted that he marked well all
such experiences, and as it were jotted them down inwardly, and indeed
he had a certain pleasure in them, though to be sure without ordering
his conduct accordingly and so deriving practical benefit from them.
Furthermore, his nature was such that he deemed such teachings much
more important and interesting than the knowledge which was forced
upon him in school; during the class hours in the vaulted Gothic
school-rooms he applied himself mostly to tasting the sensations of
such bits of insight to the lees, and thinking them out in their
entirety. This occupation afforded the same kind of satisfaction as
when he would walk up and down his room with his violin (for he played
the violin), letting the soft tones, as soft as he could produce them,
mingle with the plashing of the fountain which rose in a flickering jet
under the branches of the old walnut-tree in the garden below.

The fountain, the old walnut, his violin, and far away the sea,
the Baltic, whose summer dreams he could listen to in the long
vacation--these were the things he loved, with which he encompassed
himself, as it were, and among which his inward life ran its course;
things whose names may be employed with good effect in verse, and which
did actually ring out time and again in the verses which Tonio Kroeger
occasionally composed.

This fact, that he possessed a note-book with verse of his own in it,
had become known through his own fault, and it injured hi