As he approached Kussewitz, a little red and white house peered forth to meet him,--red as a squirrel-cage, and smiling as a summer-house. He stepped up to it and to its gleaming windows, but immediately stepped back again; he would not hinder an old human couple, for whom the bell had been the organ, from finishing their prayer. When he entered, with his face exalted by the reflection of to-day's transfiguration, an old man turned a silver head, which stood like a mild moon over the evening of his life, and a face of smiling wrinkles, toward the guest. Only a hypocrite--that stockjobber of virtue--is not, after praying, more gentle and complacent. The old woman was the first to lay aside the look of devotion. Victor, with his victorious simplicity, asked a night's lodging. To grant it to him was what only such contented people as these could do; to request it was what none could do, except one who, like him, shunned landlords, because their cold, selfish sympathy and love, coming and going with every guest, was too repulsive to his warm soul. Secondly, he was attracted by the cleanliness which even the slut loves in _strangers'_ houses, and which, in them, is a proof of contentment and of--childlessness. Thirdly, he wanted to remain to-day incognito, and out of the thronged streets, with his soul so consecrated by Nature. He soon felt himself at home; even before the supper was washed and picked and ready, he found out, or, rather, took it in, that the gentle old man, named _Lind_, was a bee-keeper. The latter I believe; for otherwise he would not have been so mild, as, in fact, in most cases, animal society is less corrupting than human. Hence Plato assigns the Lange's colloquies of man with the animals as the best thing left of Saturn's golden reign. It is not all one whether one is a dog-keeper, a lion-keeper, or a bee-keeper; for our menagerie in the lower viscera, according to the Platonic allegory, barks and bleats in unison with the external one.--When Victor actually went with the old man round the house and among the bee-hives, then he came back into the supper-room with the face of a man who claimed already a seat in the Kussewitz Church and a page in the church-book. Did he not already know that the bee-father had followed three parsons and five squires in Kussewitz to the grave; that he had celebrated his first marriage with his "mother" (so he called his wife) at the age in which the silver wedding usually falls; that his head had still memory and hair; that he expected to carry black eyebrows under the coffin-lid; that he, Lind, had not the least need, like old _Gobel_ and even the beadle _Stenz_, for the sake of his eyes, to take his place near the church-window, but could read his verse anywhere; and that he once every year went to Maienthal to church, and thrust a sovereign[113] into the church billiard-pocket,[114] because the churchyard there covered all his relations on the father's side?