"But we'll have a long wait, I'm afraid. The moon doesn't set until past quarter to seven tomorrow morning, but, if it's any consolation, dark clouds are rising from the sea and we can wait until one of those clouds comes to cover the moon as it surely will." "Yes. I take your point. I'll willingly, only too willingly, go along with your suggestion. Colleague, I'm entirely under your guardianship. We'll go to this watering hole, wait till a cloud masks that grinning monstrosity and drink the odd grog while we do so!" opined the worked-up Prussian civil servant. And so we ascended the steep steps, arrived, without having broken our necks, at the top of them and turned right through the dune grass towards the illuminated pavilion on the links, loud with blaring music and packed out with spa outpatients. Just as we went through the door of the round building, however, the brass band suddenly stopped playing. The musicians put away their instruments or tucked them under their arms. They also downed a free schnapps at the buffet counter and left, and most of their audience, strangely enough, followed on their heels without first having digested the pleasure derived from their music. Only a few groups of more discerning people continued to linger over their glasses. A rather lively wind sprang up over the North Sea. The waves crashed with greater noise and were covered with whiter and more foamy caps. The enlivening and warming drink that we had ordered before we sat down was about to have the most soothing of influences on both our state of mind and our bodily comfort. Now we were seated and while, at the next table, an animated group chatted merrily, I looked at my new acquaintance and certainly not with stealthy sideways glances, but point blank through the paraffin lamp's glow, and my astonishment grew with my scrutiny. Circuit Judge Löhnefinke from Gross-Fauhlenberg was a man of approximately fifty years of age, corpulent, as we have already commented, and otherwise without any external distinguishing marks. He had a broad chin and his hair was short and sprinkled with grey. He had the beard of a Prussian official and two clever, grey eyes which took in every object they tacked on to. None of this gave me any reason to suppose that the man was a candidate for a loony bin and yet--I couldn't help it! Laying my hand on his arm and pulling myself up close to him, I said: "Don't take this the wrong way, Löhnefinke, but right now I don't believe it happened any more." "What didn't happen?" "Your appearance just now. Your breakneck fall down the dune, that daredevil slide near Wenningstedt or, to put it in a nutshell, your vision of the moon as your enemy."