The doctor laughed. "_O tempora, o mores_--there you are! Mentor protects and nurses other people's children and does not know that his own Telemachus is lying dangerously ill at home." "You are pleased to joke." "Indeed I do; Malte is as well as a boy can be who wants to have no lessons to-morrow. But he had taken a long walk and was tired; this looked to the baron and the baroness like the beginning of typhus fever, and as there was no sensible man present to raise his voice against it, they sent at once for the unlucky man who enjoys the unenviable privilege of having to account for all the nonsense that can be found in people's heads--I mean the doctor. We had just finished supper, which--as you know, or, to speak with the baroness, as you ought to know--is always punctually served at eight o'clock, and I was just stepping into my carriage when that jewel of a boy, Bruno, came at full speed into the court-yard. You ought to have seen the horror of the baron and the baroness! He told us in breathless haste that Jake was about to die, and that Doctor Stein was by his bedside, and that I must come instantly. But, _à propos_, what does it mean that the old woman called you in that odd way, 'Young master?' I suppose I shall have to call you Baron Stein hereafter?" "What an idea!" laughed Oswald, who was very much pleased with the manner of his new acquaintance. "No; I am as little of noble birth as Mother Claus, who, I cannot imagine why, but probably misled by some dim recollections of her early days, insists upon making me her young master." "She is a strange old woman," said the doctor. "Just see how beautifully the moon rises there over the edge of the forest, and how lightly the mist is resting on the meadows--a very strange woman! I remember now that I have been struck by her before--she looks like--well, like what?" "Like an old, old woman from Grimm's Fairy Tales, who at the proper time changes into a beautiful princess!" "That is it--she has a wonderful fire in her deep-sunk eyes. She always looks to me as if her old face was only a mask under which she hides a youthful soul." "So it is in reality," said Oswald, and he told the doctor the strange conversation he had had with Mother Claus the day before on the heath, and how her words had appeared to him as natural and truthful as the song of the lark on the heath, and how little he had been pleased afterwards with the sermon of the self-sufficient preacher.