CHAPTER IV. The postman who carried Helen's letter in the evening to town, had been there once before in the morning of the same day. He had brought Oswald a letter from one of his friends in Grunwald, who was at the same time one of the few with whom Professor Berger was intimate. This gentleman, a teacher at the University, wrote Oswald that he thought he was bound to inform him promptly of an event which had created, the day before, the greatest consternation in the city. Professor Berger had suddenly become insane; at least no one had had the slightest suspicion of his affection. He had come, as usual, at four o'clock to deliver his lecture on Logic, and had commenced his discourse as ably and ingeniously as ever. Then his words had gradually become more and more confused, so that one student after the other had laid down his pen, staring at his neighbor in wonder and terror. "Do you know, gentlemen," he had said, "what the youth of Saïs beheld when he raised the veil that hid the great secret?--the great secret which was to be the key to all the confused riddles of life? You see, gentlemen, I take my head, I open it thus, one-half in this hand, the other in that hand, what do you see in this head of the great Professor Berger, at whose feet you sit listening to his wise words, and taking them down with hideously grating pens in your tiresome note-books? What do you see? Exactly what the youth of Saïs saw, when he raised the veil of truth: Nothing! Absolutely nothing, nothing in itself, nothing for itself! And this lesson, that all our best endeavors amount to nothing, that we spend our life's blood for nothing, that, gentlemen, deprived the youth of Saïs of his senses, that has made me mad, and will one of these days send you to an asylum, if you have any brains in your empty heads. And now, gentlemen, shut up your stupid note-books, so that the scribbling may come to an end, and join me in the noble and significative song: There is a fly on the wall, a fly, a fly!" Berger had then commenced to sing in a loud voice, beating his desk with his hands; had run along the walls of the lecture-room, trying to catch imaginary flies, and had each time opened the hand cautiously, looked in, and cried out triumphantly: "Nothing, gentlemen, you see nothing, and ever nothing!" Oswald's correspondent closed with the news that Professor Berger had immediately been sent to the celebrated Insane Asylum of Doctor Birkenhain, in N., and that he had allowed his friends to dispose of him as they thought best, after they had persuaded him that he was going to see there the Original Nothing.