The small Johann Buddenbrook lay on his back, his little face, in its frame of long light-brown hair, turned toward the room. He was breathing softly but audibly into the pillow. Only the fingers showed beneath the too long, too wide sleeves of his nightgown: one of his hands lay on his breast, the other on the coverlet, with the bent fingers jerking slightly now and then. The half-parted lips moved a little too, as if forming words. From time to time a pained expression mounted over the little face, beginning with a trembling of the chin, making the lips and the delicate nostrils quiver and the muscles of the narrow forehead contract. The long dark eyelashes did not hide the blue shadows that lay in the corners of the eyes. “He is dreaming,” said Frau Permaneder, moved. She bent over the child and gently kissed his slumbering cheek; then she composed the curtains and went back to the table, where Ida, in the golden light from the lamp, drew a fresh stocking over her darning-ball, looked at the hole, and began to fill it in. “You are darning, Ida--funny, I can’t imagine you doing anything else.” “Yes, yes, Tony. The boy tears everything, now he has begun to go to school.” “But he is such a quiet, gentle child.” “Ye-s, he is. But even so--” “Does he like going to school?” “Oh, no-o, Tony. He would far rather have gone on here with me. And I should have liked it better too. The masters haven’t known him since he was a baby, the way I have--they don’t know how to take him, when they are teaching him. It is often hard for him to pay attention, and he gets tired so easily--” “Poor darling! Have they whipped him yet?” “No, indeed. Sakes alive, how could they have the heart, if the boy once looked at them--?” “How was it the first time he went? Did he cry?” “Yes, indeed, he did. He cries so easily--not loud, but sort of to himself. And he held your brother by the coat and begged to be allowed to stop at home--” “Oh, my brother took him, did he?--Yes, that is a hard moment, Ida. I remember it like yesterday. I _howled_, I do assure you. I howled like a chained-up dog; I felt dreadfully. And why? Because I had had such a good time at home. I noticed at once that all the children from the nice houses wept, and the others not at all--they just stared and grinned at us.--Goodness, what is the matter with him, Ida?” She turned in alarm toward the little bed, where a cry had interrupted her chatter. It was a frightened cry, and it repeated itself in an even more anguished tone the next minute; and then three, four, five times more, one after another. “Oh, oh, _oh_!” It became a loud, desperate protest against something which he saw or which was happening to him. The next moment little Johann sat upright in bed, stammering incomprehensibly, and staring with wide-open, strange golden-brown eyes into a world which he, and he alone, could see.