When Walpurga awoke, early on Monday morning, Hansei was nowhere to be seen. The week's work had begun. Before daylight, he had taken his scythe and gone out to his mountain meadow, where he was now mowing the dewy grass. He worked with such joy, such pleasure and calmness, that it seemed as if an invisible power were guiding his hand. When the breakfast was ready and Walpurga had searched for her husband everywhere, and thinking that he might have gone fishing, had called out for him back of the house and down by the lake, she went out into the garden again and looked up into the cherry-tree. Perhaps he was up there, although this constant plucking of cherries would be too much of a good thing. At the same moment, she looked toward the hill, and saw Hansei coming home, his scythe glittering in the sun. Walpurga beckoned to him. He quickened his pace and told her how much he had already done. "Ah!" said he, stretching his limbs while he seated himself at the breakfast-table, "it does one good to work before breakfast, and then come home and find wife and child and mother, with something warm and good to eat, waiting for you--Ah! that tastes good. Sunday's beautiful, but a workday's much finer. I wouldn't care to be one of your quality, who have Sunday all the year round. If I only had lots of fields and meadows and forests, so that I could always work on my own land." "We'll have them, God willing," answered Walpurga. They were a happy party at breakfast, and the child was full of life. They had been sitting together for a little while, when the innkeeper's servant entered and brought Hansei his beer-mug with his name engraved on the pewter lid, and signified that the innkeeper desired no further visits on his part. Hansei sent word to the host that he had better return the two hundred florins that he still owed him. He did not like to send such a message by the servant, but he felt that he ought to give him tit for tat. "And tell him, besides," he called out to the servant, "he's often been warned that he might get hold of the wrong fellow. Just tell him that I'm the wrong fellow." Hansei could not help feeling sad while he looked at the empty beer-mug. Who knew how long it would remain empty. Perhaps forever. And it's no trifling matter to be excluded from the village inn. It's almost as hard as to live in a small capital where the prince gives entertainments, and to be unable to take part in them because you are not admitted at court. "There's a new tap," they'd say; "there's a new wine purchase; there are entertaining strangers there--" He was now excluded from the best thing there was in the village. When he looked at his tankard it was with sad thoughts, and with a prophetic sense of the thirst which in future he would be unable to quench.