'The Contriver, Johannes, was very shrewd, but in everything he made he forgot something, and men have as much as they can do to patch up these defects as best they may. You have only to look about you. An umbrella, a pair of spectacles--for shelter and better sight--these are specimens of man's patching. They are no part of the original plan. But the Contriver never considered that men would have colds, and read books, and do a thousand other things for which his plan was inadequate. He gave his children clothes without reflecting that they would outgrow them. Almost all men have by this time long outgrown their natural outfit. Now they do everything for themselves, and never trouble themselves at all about the Contriver and his schemes. What he failed to give them, they simply take by brute force; and when the obvious result is that they must die, they evade death, sometimes for a long period, by a variety of devices.' 'But it is men's own fault,' said Johannes. 'Why do they wilfully deviate from the laws of nature?' 'Oh, silly Johannes! If a nursemaid lets an innocent child play with fire and it is burned, whose fault is it? The child's, who knew nothing about fire; or the nurse's, who knew that it would burn itself? And who is to blame if men pine in misery and disobedience to nature--they or the all-wise Contriver, compared with whom we are ignorant children?' 'But they are not ignorant, they know--' 'Johannes, if you say to a child: Do not touch that fire, it will hurt you--and if the child touches it all the same because it does not know what pain is, can you then plead your own innocence and say: The child was not ignorant? Did you not know that it would not heed your advice? Men are as foolish as children. Glass is brittle and clay is soft. And He who made men and did not take their folly into account, is like a man who should make weapons of glass and not expect them to break, or arrows of clay and not expect them to bend.' His words fell like drops of liquid fire on Johannes's soul, and his heart swelled with a great grief to which his former woes were as nothing, and which often made him weep in the silent, sleepless hours of the night. Oh, for sleep! sleep! There came a time after long days, when nothing was so dear to him as sleep. Then he neither thought nor suffered; in his dreams he was always carried back to his old life. It seemed to him beautiful as he dreamed of it, but day by day he could never remember exactly how things had then been. He only knew that the vexations and cravings of that former time were better than the vacant, stagnant feeling of the present. He once had longed bitterly for Windekind; he once had waited hour after hour on Robinetta. How delightful that had been!