His father was in the passage, walking up and down it, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders up to his ears as though he were shrinking from blows. He told me what his unhappy son had done. Not able to endure the trumpet when it was being blown up at our house earlier in the evening, not able to endure it even softened, chastened, subdued by distance and the intervening walls, he had directed his mother to go up and invite the player down to her kitchen, where he was to be cajoled into eating and drinking, because, as the son explained, full of glee at his sagacity, no man who is eating and drinking can at the same time be blowing a trumpet. 'Thus,' said his father, in jerks coincident with the breath-takings of the trumpeter, 'did he hope to obtain peace.' 'But he didn't,' said I. 'No. For a period there was extreme, delicious quiet. Mother'--so he invariably describes his wife--' sacrificed her best sausage, for how shall we permit our son to be tortured? The bread was spread with butter three centimeters deep. The trumpeter and his _Schatz_ sat quietly in the kitchen eating it. We sat quietly on the veranda discussing great themes. Then that good beer my son so often praises, that excellent, barrel-kept, cellar-lodged Pilsner beer, bright as amber, clear as ice, cool as--cool as--' 'A cucumber,' I assisted. 'Good. Very good. As a cucumber--as a salad of cucumbers.' 'No, no--there's pepper in a salad. You'd better just keep to plain cucumber,' I interrupted, always rather nice in the matter of images. 'Cool, then, as plain cucumber--this usually admirable stuff instead of, as we had expected, sending him gradually and pleasantly to sleep--I mean, of course, making him gradually and pleasantly so sleepy that thoughts of his bed, growing in affection with every glass, would cause him to arise and depart to his barracks,--woke him up. And, my dear Fräulein, you yourself heard--you are hearing now--how completely it did it.' 'Is he--is he--?' I inquired nervously. The neighbor nodded. 'He is,' he said; 'he has consumed fourteen glasses.' And indeed he was; and I should say from the tumult, from the formlessness of it, the tunelessness, the rollicksomeness, that never was anybody more so. 'I fear my son will leave us for some quieter spot before his holiday is over,' said the neighbor, looking distressed. And perhaps it will convince you more than anything else I have said of the extreme value of our Johannas, when I tell you that, goaded by the noise and by his disappointed face to rash promises, I declared I would dismiss the girl unless she broke off such an engagement, and he stared at me for a moment in astonishment and then resignedly shook his head and said with the weary conviction of a householder of thirty years' standing, '_Das geht doch nicht._' Yours sincerely, ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT. XLIII Galgenberg, Sept. 9th.