"I, heir to such an endless stream of prose," my colleague continued, "am defeated by my foe and by him led astray each time he peeps over the horizon despite all my efforts to resist him. I am an idealist in politics and a poet in the conduct of my household affairs. I can see the time coming when I'll be keeping my books of account in hexameters and ottave rime. I'm a stickler for sentiment and cosiness in the course of an hour, and--colleague! colleague!-- my women, my ladies don't understand me, don't latch on to me. That's the reason that my nerves are so shattered and the reason why at their instigation (the instigation of my wife and daughter, I mean) I have been brought here to Westerland, and now please do me the honour of coming home with me. It's gradually starting to get very cool." He had linked me--with delicacy--and we walked arm in arm over the moonlit heathland of Sylt. Never in my life had I with such a poetic Prussian circuit judge strode out hip to hip. He, my exalted colleague, declaimed poetry in an ever louder voice. He showed a truly staggering well-readness in both German and foreign lyricism. Poems addressed to the moon gave way to hymns to freedom and songs of battle against all kinds of enemies both thinkable and unthinkable. Tropical landscapes and mood pictures gave way to stanzas taken from familiar and unfamiliar ballads and romances of every historical and non-historical type of content. Löhnefinke was sublime and his enemy, the moon, could really take pleasure in him. But, being in this state, he would have aroused in more than one of his and my superiors not only moral but also physical disgust. In the distance to the north the revolving light of the lighthouse at Kampen blinked like the eye of a mocker, who draws the attention of those around him to something hilarious. The sheep out on the heath, over whose leashes or retaining ropes we stumbled, stood up and looked after us astonished and amazed. In this way we got nearer and nearer to the village of Westerland, but before we reached it we were called to and, to all appearances visible and audible, were torn in the nicest possible way out of our dreamy moonlight wandering by night back to reality. Fortunately neither of us fell off the roof. As if made out of moonbeams there stood before us on a knoll of the heath an uncommonly dainty and graceful female form and a quite charming female face bowed to us in the moonlight and looked phenomenally pretty. Whether Circuit Judge Löhnefinke from Gross-Fauhlenberg had a charming face I cannot say, but he possessed a modest, in a way quite jovial face and his enthusiasm of the last few hours had embellished it. So I was all the more surprised by the expression with which he looked at his lovely daughter. Instead of becoming happier and even more cheerful, his features suddenly went slack and immediately transformed themselves into a cross between sullen and peevish.