BY FRIEDRICH SPIELHAGEN FROM THE GERMAN BY WILLIAM HAND BROWNE _Author's Edition_. NEW YORK LEYPOLDT & HOLT 25 Bond Street 1870. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by LEYPOLDT & HOLT, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. STEREOTYPED BY PRESS OF DENNIS BRO'S & THORNE, THE NEW YORK PRINTING COMPANY AUBURN, N. Y. _81, 83, and 85 Centre Street_, NEW YORK HAMMER AND ANVIL. PART FIRST. CHAPTER I. We were standing in a deep recess at the open window of our class-room. The sparrows were noisily chattering in the school-yard, and some scattered rays of the late summer sun glanced past the old gray walls down to the grass-grown pavement; from the class-room, which was high-ceilinged, sunless, and ill-ventilated, came the buzzing sound of repressed talk from our schoolfellows, who were all in their places, bent over their Sophocles, and watching for the arrival of the "old man," who was looked for every moment. "At the worst, you can shuffle through somehow," I was saying, when the door opened and he came in. _He_--Professor Lederer, Provisory Director of the Gymnasium, and Ordinarius of the first form,[1] "the old man," as we used to call him--was in reality not exactly old, but a man past the middle of the forties, whose small head, already turning gray, rested upon a stiff white cravat, and whose tall and extraordinarily lean figure was buttoned up, from one year's end to the other, summer and winter, in a coat of the finest and glossiest black. His slender hands, of which he took extreme care, with their long and tapering fingers--when twitching nervously, as they had a habit of doing, close under my eyes--had always a sort of fascination for me, and more than once I could scarcely resist the temptation to seize one of those artistic-looking hands and crush it in my own coarse brown fist.