"With pleasure. If I had lived in the middle ages I should not have ruined my eyes by reading dusty old books. If the middle ages really had any advantages over ours, it was this, that people were not compelled to learn so much. Just imagine: no schools, no Cornelius Nepos, no history of the middle ages, no examinations, only a few sparring lessons with an old soldier who had served a number of masters and knew how to tell a good story of every one of them, and then if a man wanted to be very highly cultivated, a few lessons on the lute from a strolling minstrel--a merry, boisterous fellow, who was full of pretty songs and gay tricks, who had sung under a thousand windows and kissed a thousand girls,--what a life it must have been! And above all, this facility of changing your residence; this perfect freedom to move about at will, limited at most by a couple of stout fellows, who knocked your brains out in a hollow lane, if they pleased. Georges Sand has said a pretty thing in one of her novels, the only one I remember, probably because it was spoken as from my soul: 'What is there finer than a highroad?' Is not that well said? I could kiss the woman for that sentence, though she is a blue-stocking, and I hate blue-stockings like poison. I won't say like the devil, because he is after all but an unappreciated man of genius, and therefore deserves the sympathy of every educated man. But if a man of our day is pursued by the devil's own knaves, his creditors, where can he flee to? Then in those good old times a man would pack his knapsack some fine morning, or, if he had none, pack himself and march out of the city gate, and after a quarter of an hour, when he was outside the corporation, he was safe, and before evening came he had passed through so many adventures already that he had long since forgotten the old city and the pretty nut-brown maid, for whom but yesterday he vowed to live and die. Have you done? Well, let us see! Hm! You draw like some great painters, the face not as nature has made it, but as nature ought to have made it, if she had not unfortunately been blind at the proper moment. Very pretty, indeed, but I prefer the original. And you are a poet, too, as I see!" "How so?" "Well, the other side of this paper, I see, is covered with verses, and above all, sonnets, which I love passionately. May I read them?" "They are not worth reading," said Oswald, visibly embarrassed by Albert's question.--The verses were addressed to Melitta; they had been written in memory of their first meeting in the forest cottage! He thought he had put the papers carefully away in his writing-desk, and now bitterly repented his imprudence, which had placed them now in the hand of his impertinent guest, whom he had every reason to fear was by no means discreet. Fortunately, Melitta's name was not mentioned.