Vogt listened perfunctorily. He nodded assent to all the garrulous old man said. It was quite true, the beasts looked well cared-for. He patted the strawberry cow, who was in calf; and she turned her head towards him as she lay in her stall comfortably chewing the cud. Yet he could not feel easy. With his foot he pushed aside some straw that was littering about the place, and he carefully avoided the dung that lay on the stones of the yard. He went down to the village and got the keys. A stuffy, chilly atmosphere met him in the passage and exhaled from every room. Thick dust lay everywhere on floors and furniture. Nothing had been moved from its place, and every picture hung as usual on the wall. But it seemed to Vogt as if the rooms were empty and the walls bare. He shuddered with cold and with the sense of loneliness. In the living-room his father's plain easy-chair was pushed up to the table, and beside it the stool on which the son had usually sat. It looked as if they had both only been out into the field for a moment and would return immediately; but yet he could not feel at home. Franz Vogt looked about him sadly. All else was as of old; but his father lay in the churchyard beneath the heaped-up clay of his newly-made grave, and the son stood like a stranger in his father's house. The lowing of the cows aroused him from his dismal brooding. He had sent away old Wackwitz after rewarding him liberally: for he meant to do as his father had done, and manage all the work himself. He gave the beasts their food, which had already been prepared for them. There was not a scrap of bread nor of butter in the house for himself. He made his way down to the village in the dark, and was glad to find that the baker's shop was not yet shut, and that a neighbour could provide him with some butter. And when, dead tired after the varying experiences of the day, he went upstairs, there were no sheets on his bed. He could not take the trouble to rummage in the linen-chest, and crept heavy-heartedly between the rough woollen blankets. Early next morning he was aroused by the uneasy mooing of the cows. He sprang from bed and scarcely gave himself time to wash. He had to bestir himself, and the fagging and worry lasted without intermittence from morning until night. He had hardly time to go down to the village inn in the middle of the day and get a hot meal. He would not allow himself to fall short in any way, and was unremitting in his exertions. But was this the condition on which, while a soldier, he had looked back with such longing? This haste and breathless labour, this hurrying from one thing to another without pause or rest? He smiled bitterly to himself, and looked about him with dull, joyless eyes. He was tired with his day's work, and his back ached with fatigue; where was that joy of labour, which had formerly sustained him, and had lightened the burden on his shoulders?