"Does the cat come to the porridge at last?" crows Doctor Willibrod. "Oh, he thinks that we have not long seen how he licks his paws! And the porridge is so sweet--so sweet! just like the thought that such a girl can give her heart to such a fellow. 'It is impossible,' says Master Tom, and his whiskers bristle with distress. Why, impossible? What is impossible? Is the life of her father anything but a protracted sacrifice? Is she not her father's daughter? When one is once well under way, a little more or less makes no difference; and the lamb offers itself up to save the wolf. Oh, it is a merry business, that of saving wolves! But still merrier is it to stand by and look patiently on--not to seize a club and rush in--oh by no means! but merely to ask from time to time: 'Don't you think, respected sir, that the wolf will eat the Iamb at last?' Get away from me all of you that wear human faces!" Doctor Willibrod crows so high, and looks so exactly like the apoplectic billiard-ball we have heard of, that I am sorry to have begun the conversation, and that too so unskilfully. I now recollect that lately the doctor has always seemed curiously excited whenever in any way Paula's name happened to be mentioned. Often he speaks of her in such a way that one would think he hated her, if one did not know that he worships her. If any one reproaches him with it, he lays the blame on the heat of the weather. The fiend himself, who is used to a warm climate, might perhaps keep cool in such a temperature, he says, but no one can blame mere men if they now and then lose their wits a little at eighty degrees in the shade. And really during the latter part of the summer the heat has grown absolutely intolerable. Day after day the sun traverses a cloudless steel-blue sky, and its beams prostrate everything they touch. The grass has long been burnt up; the bastion and ramparts are yellow-brown; the flowers have prematurely withered; the foliage rustles from the trees before the time. All living things creep about with heavy gaze fixed upon the earth, and the air quivers as above a heated oven. The health of the town has been seriously affected, and we are glad that the boys who now have holiday, are on a visit to some friends of the family at a neighboring country-place. The state of things in the prison is by no means satisfactory to the superintendent and the doctor, who vie with each other in attention to the sick, though the doctor steadily maintains that it is the height of folly to risk one's skin for the sake of other people. "And then beside, when, like _Humanus_, one has but half a lung, and a blind wife and four children, and not a shilling of capital--what will come of that?"