expression and goes on waxing until it is full again while you, day after day, week after week, go about your business. You start to feel immensely uncomfortable. You come over to yourself as unspeakably stupid, silly and tasteless and sniff out stupid things to say, to which purpose your nose is entirely suited. You go home and look at your hair starting to grow long in the mirror and if you should discover thereby a white hair in your beard, your good friend the moon finds this most opportune, for it is in a position to bind you more tightly and to pursue its ends more easily for that than for anything else. The next time you find yourself once more alone in the night sitting on the windowsill, it makes you think about that hair. You long for a bosom, a sweet, soft, tender bosom into which you can pour all your sadness, to which you can speak your sorrow and with which you can share your frustrations and annoyance. You dream while still awake and the moon laughs at you even more than before..." "Wait a minute, Löhnefinke!" I cried, pressing both hands to my brow. "Must it always be another person to clarify and be objective about one's own past, present and future circumstances? Colleague, you're absolutely right. Even though you are highly strung, I can still follow your argument! Carry on with what you were saying--truly the moon is a monster!" "It certainly is and this German moon is especially! It comes up over your roof and you lay your head on your shoulder and stand there blinking at it full in the face and feeling silly and embarrassed. And all of a sudden a field of harvest-ripe wheat sways into your field of vision, a nightingale or some other such songbird chirps in bushes, a pond lights up, a brook babbles and you, colleague, commence to babble too. What do you babble? Some nice-sounding Christian name given at baptism of course ending with an E or an A--Clothilde, Josephine, Maria, Amalia--who knows!? It's all one anyway. The decision has been made for you. It's got you. It's got you with everything you have, that crafty old malicious moon, that German moon! You even feel inclined to call it your friend, to stretch out your arms to it, to shed a tear for it and you are, beyond any further doubt, hopelessly disappointed." "Yes, I see!" I said, and nothing more. But my colleague went into a silent brown study for a time, until he pulled himself together and went on: "I was an elected representative of the regional parliament when, during the national argument over how the army should be organised from 1862 to 1866, His Majesty sent his gift of the famous symbolic stick to our prime minister. I voted of course with the majority and now, now in this year of Our Lord 1867, I have written a sonnet--a sonnet, just imagine!--a sonnet in praise of our venerable prime minister and had it published in the advertisement pages of our national daily. Can you understand me and my relationship to that moon of ours?"