"Dottore, dottore!" he said, "you look as if you suffered excruciating pain from the grog which I have drunk last night. Upon my word, you disgrace the weather! Did you ever sit, as a boy, in a garret window, sending from a short clay pipe beautiful soap-bubbles into the bright air, while down stairs among the leaden soldiers a half-finished exercise was lying, which was to earn you, a few hours later, a sound whipping on the part of your teacher? You see, that is a picture of life. Our knowledge is a half-finished exercise, and our best exercises remain fragments; the most brilliant soap-bubbles will burst, and the hardest whipping is forgotten in an hour or two. All is vanity, but especially our regret that all is vanity! Why? I did not make the world, and, as far as I know, you did not make it Why, then, should we two rack our brains about it? I rack my brains about nothing, for instance, not even about this line, which I have evidently made too short, and which I must now at random extend gracefully till it meets this angle--by the by, a most romantic corner of the wood, where I met a most charming little red-cheeked peasant girl, who, no doubt, is the cause of my mistake. Well, no matter! The account does not always tally, why else should we have fractions, and the Grenwitz entail remains, for all that, a very beautiful invention, especially for that poor boy Malte. Is the boy really as stupid as he looks?" "By no means," replied Oswald, who shared the little sofa in the room with a tin box for dried plants, from which a stocking of blue yarn was bashfully peeping forth. "Malte can count up to five, and considerably beyond. He has a decided talent for many things, especially for arithmetic, while Bruno, who lacks that talent, remains a long way behind him." "Yes, Providence is wise," said Albert, preparing his sepia within a little porcelain vessel; "it gives to him who is to eat turtle-soup in life, a gold spoon at his birth, and he to whom she doles out the ship-biscuit of poverty receives kindly a number of hollow teeth, so that he need not be long annoyed by his hard fare. I, for my part, received by mistake a set of excellent teeth, and thus I relish my hard-tack prodigiously,--so much, in fact, that I can never feel very angry at these empty-headed, thick-bellied children of my step-mother Nature, who are eating turtle-soup with gold spoons, and are thoroughly spoilt in the bargain. But one thing I should like, and that is, if there should turn up a claimant to the codicil in the last will of Baron Harald, who died in delirium tremens, and no doubt now sleeps in the bosom of Father Abraham." "Then you know the sad story?" asked Oswald.