And now the fair, blue after-summer days of this year's October floated on tender butterfly-wings of spider-webs across the heavens. Victor said to himself, "Fair earthly heaven, I will take one more walk beneath thee! Good mother-land, I will look out upon thee once more, with thy woods and mountains, and fix thy image in the immortal soul, ere thy yellow green grows over my heart, and strikes its roots therein. I will see thee, St. Luna of my childhood, and you, my fair Whitsuntide paths, and thee, thou blessed Maienthal, and thee, thou good old Bee-father,[177] and will give back to thee thy watch that counts the hours of joy----and then I shall have lived long enough." He asked himself, "Am I, then, ripe for the granary of the churchyard?--But then is any man ripe? Is he not in his ninetieth year still incomplete as in his twentieth?"--Yes, indeed! Death takes off children and Patagonians; man is summer fruit, which Heaven must pluck before it matures. The other world is no uniform alley and orangery, but the tree-nursery of our present seed-nursery. Before Victor left the blind one, with tears and kisses, he sent for poor Marie the evening previous to come to the cabinet, and commended to her (as well as to the Italian servant) the care of the dependent youth. But his design was to give and announce beforehand to the crushed and powerless soul the hope of some hundred florins; for so much he could already expect as inheritance from his well-circumstanced father, Eymann. The selfishness of this humiliated creature, which would have made others cold, was precisely what moved his innermost being. Long since he had said, "One should not have compassion on any man who thought philosophically or loftily, least of all on a learned man,--with such a one the wasp-stings of fate hardly went through the stocking,--on the contrary, with the poor vulgar soul he suffered and wept infinitely, which knew nothing greater than the goods of earth, and which, without principles, without consolation, pale, helpless, convulsed, and rigid, sank at the sight of the ruin of its goods."--It therefore only redoubled his pity when this Marie in wild gratitude passed in his presence from abrupt utterances of thanks, ejaculations, gushes of joy, to kissing of the coat, silly laughing, and kneeling.