"Your father is right"--commenced for the third time the professor, who held it his duty to strike in while the iron was hot--"when was there ever a father who has done more for his children than your excellent parent, whose integrity, industry and virtue have become a proverb, and who through your fault is now deprived of the crowning ornament of a good citizen; that is, a well-disciplined son, to be the stay of his declining years. Is it not enough that inevitable fate has already hard smitten this excellent man--that he has lost a dear consort and a son in the bloom of youth? Shall he now lose the last, the Benjamin of his old age? Shall his unwearied solicitude, his daily and nightly prayers----" My father was a man of strictest principles, but far from devout, in the ordinary acceptation of the word; an untruth was his abhorrence, and it was an untruth to say that he had prayed by night and day; and besides, he had an excessive, almost morbid modesty, and the professor's panegyric struck him as exaggerated and ill-timed. "Let all that pass, Herr Professor"--he interrupted the learned man rather impatiently--"I say again, I have done my duty. Enough! let him do his. I want nothing of him--nothing--nothing whatever--not so much as"--and he brushed one hand over the other; "but this I will have, and if he refuses----" My father had worked himself into a rage again, and my apparent composure only further exasperated him. Strange! Had I fallen to prayers and entreaties, I know that my father would have despised me, and yet, because I did what he himself would most assuredly have done in my position, because I was silent and stubborn, he hated me at this moment as one hates anything that stands in one's way, and which yet cannot be spurned aside with contempt. "You have been guilty of a heavy offence, George Hartwig"--the professor began again in a declamatory tone--"that of leaving the Gymnasium without the permission of your teachers. I will not speak of the boundless disrespect with which, as so often before, you rejected the precious opportunity offered you of acquiring knowledge: I will only speak of the terrible guilt of disobedience, of insolent defiance of orders, of the evil example that your disgraceful conduct has presented to your class-mates. If Arthur von Zehren's facile temper has at last been warped into confirmed frivolity, this is the evil fruit of your bad example. Never would that misguided boy have dared to do what he has done to-day----" As I knew the misguided boy so much better than he, I here broke into a loud, contemptuous laugh, which drove the professor completely beyond his self-control. He caught up his hat, and muttering some unintelligible words, apparently expressing his conviction that I was lost beyond all possibility of reformation, was about to leave the room, when he was detained by my father.