Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by Google Books Transcriber's Notes: 1. Page source: http://books.google.com/books?id=TWcqAAAAYAAJ&dq 2. This volume include four short-stories: Iolanthe's Wedding; The Woman Who Was His Friend; The New Year's Eve Confession; and The Gooseherd. IOLANTHE'S WEDDING BY HERMANN SUDERMANN AUTHOR OF "THE SONG OF SONGS" TRANSLATED BY ADELE S. SELTZER NEW YORK BONI AND LIVERIGHT 1918 Copyright, 1918, By BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc. CONTENTS Iolanthe's Wedding The Woman Who Was His Friend The New Year's Eve Confession The Gooseherd IOLANTHE'S WEDDING IOLANTHE'S WEDDING CHAPTER I I tell _you_, gentlemen, it's a rotten piece of business to be standing beside an old friend's open grave-simply disgusting. You stand with your feet planted in the upturned earth, and twirl your moustache and look stupid, while you feel like crying the soul out of your body. He was dead--there was no use wishing he weren't. In him was lost the greatest genius for concocting and mixing punches, cocktails, grogs, cobblers--every sort of drink. I tell you, gentlemen, when you went walking in the country with him and he began to draw the air in through his nose in his peculiar fashion, you might be sure he had just conceived a new idea for a punch. From the mere smell of a weed he knew the sorts of wine that had to be poured over it to bring into being a something extra fine, a something that had never before existed. All in all he was a good fellow, and in the many years we sat opposite each other, evening after evening, when he came to me at Ilgenstein, or I rode over to him at Doebeln, the time never dragged. If only it hadn't been for his eternal marriage schemes. That was his weak side. I mean as far as I was concerned. As for himself--"Good Lord," he'd say, "I'm just waiting for that vile water to creep up to my heart, then I'll slide off into the next world." And now it had come to that. He had slid off. He lay there in his black coffin, and I felt like tapping on the lid and saying: "Puetz, don't play this dirty trick on me. Come out. Why, what's going to become of our piquet to-day?" Nothing to laugh at, gentlemen. Habit is the most violent of all passions, and the number of persons that are ruined every year by having their habits interfered with are never sung in song or epic, to quote my old friend Uhland.