On the first day of Easter; Sebastian, full of snow-clouds as the heavens above him, stole out of the farm-buildings of the passions,--I mean the residence-city,--but not till towards evening, in order not, to-day, with a heart whose very foundation had been washed away by a half-year's rainstorm, to be long a burden to any friend. On the mountain behind which Flachsenfingen drops down as by a sinking of the earth, he turned round toward the dusky city, and let the remembrance pass by as an evening mist before his soul, how, three quarters of a year ago, in the refulgence of summer and of hope, he had looked out so joyously over these houses,--I described it long ago,--and he compared his prospects of that time with his present desolation; at last he said: "Only say to thyself outright, what thou _hast_ and what thou _meanest_,--namely, thou hast nothing more, not a loved or loving heart in the whole city,--but thou meanest once more to march to St. Luna, and, all impoverished as thou art, to take the _second_ leave of the pale angel whom thy robbed and ruined heart cannot forget, as thou climbest after the sun, and, having already seen his setting from out a valley, once more seest him sink, from a mountain." ... Five half Sabbath-day's journeys from the village he espied the Court-Chaplain, pursued by a Catechumen (as well of the tailoring craft as of Christianity). In vain did he and the young tailor seek to overtake the hotly hunted shepherd of souls. The shepherd came not to a stand until the youngster had got into his house. A hundred-and-twenty-pounder (that is my physical weight) gets no addition to his æsthetic weight by keeping so long to himself the insignificant cause of this insignificant running, and not saying till now that the Chaplain could absolutely hear no one coming after him, because he was afraid the man would smash him from behind. Now the apprentice wanted to tread in the footsteps of his spiritual master and come up with him,--the more fiercely the master dashed forward through space to leave the other behind him, so much the longer leaps forward did the scholar take to overtake him,--that was the whole scrape, but so do men chase men. Victor ran with outflying arms to a pair of hanging ones, which the owner in his agony could not raise. But in the parsonage two warmer ones folded themselves around his frozen bosom, those of his countrywoman; nor did the parson's wife disturb his and her resurrection-joy with a single complaint of his long absence,--this delicacy of friendship, which spared another unprofitable apologies, he reciprocrated with double warmth, and with a voluminous bill of accusation against his own follies. She led him up a stairway in the joyful parsonage, which to-night was one pierced-work of lighted stories, to her dear son's embrace, and into the presence of the three kindred sons from one mother-country, the three twins....