He broke out into a hard laugh. “Yes; a wretched pittance: full two thousand thalers.” She sighed with relief, for she almost felt as if she had already heard that terrible “Nothing” hissed from his lips. “What good are two thousand thalers to us?” he continued, “after we have thrown fifty thousand into the swamp? Perhaps I shall open a public-house in the town, or trade in buttons and ribbons. Perhaps you might help me, if you were to do the sewing in some aristocratic houses; and the children might sell matches in the streets. Ha, ha, ha!” He thrust his hand through his gray and bushyhair, and inadvertently kicked the cradle with his foot, so that it swayed to and fro violently. “Why has this brat been born?” he murmured, gloomily. He knelt down near the cradle and buried the tiny little fists in his big red hands, and talked to his child: “If you had known, my boy, how bad and vile this world is, how impudence triumphs, and honesty goes to ruin in it, you would really have stayed where you were. What fate will yours be? Your father is a sort of vagabond, a ruined man, who has to roam about the streets with his wife and his three children till he has found a place where he can completely ruin himself and his family.” “Max, do not speak thus; you break my heart!” called out Frau Elsbeth, crying, and stretching out her hand to lay it round her husband’s neck; but her hand sank down without strength ere it had reached its destination. He sprang up. “You are right; enough of these lamentations. Yes; if I were alone now--a bachelor, as in former days--I should go to America, or the Russian Steppes--there one can get rich; or I should speculate on the Exchange--to-day up, to-morrow down. Oh, there one could earn money; but so tied as one is!” He threw a lamentable glance at his wife and child; then he pointed with his hand towards the yard, from whence resounded the laughing voices of the two elder children. “Yes; I know we must be a burden to you now,” said the woman, meekly. “Don’t talk to me of burdens,” he answered, gruffly; “what I said was not meant angrily. I love you, and that’s enough. Now the question only is, Where to go? If at least this baby had not come, the chance of an uncertain existence might be borne for some time. But now, you ill, the child requiring careful nursing, the end of it is there is nothing for it but to buy a farm, and to give the two thousand thalers for a premium. Hurrah! that will be a nice sort of life: I with the beggar’s wallet, you with the knapsack; I with the spade, you with the milk-pail.” “That would not be the worst, after all,” said the woman, softly. “No?” he laughed, bitterly. “Well, that I can get for you. There is Mussainen, for instance, which is to be sold--the wretched moorland on the heath yonder.” “Oh, why that of all places?” she asked, shuddering. He immediately fell in love with the idea.