CHAPTER V. A couple of days later, the sun looked down in the morning right out of a rain-cloud, over the landlord's garden at Gurlitz. Her daughter, the Earth, had been having a great washing, and now she would help her dear child a little with the drying. It was, as it is always, a great pleasure to see the old mother settle herself to the task, and with her broad, friendly face peer out, now here, now there, from the white cloud-curtain, and again grasp the sprinkler, to dampen the bleached clothes a little more. On such an occasion she was always very sportive; she had the drollest fancies, and played as many tricks in her old age as the youngest girl, when she is beloved for the first time,--now she was sad enough to cry, and again she laughed heartily. To-day, moreover, the old woman had reason to laugh, as she looked down into the Gurlitz garden. "Now, just look there!" cried she, and smiled right goldenly over the meadow and the green corn, "how strangely things go on in this crazy world! For long years I have always seen down there that pretty, white fellow standing, and holding out a staff to me, that the poor hungry creatures of the human race might be able to know when it was mid-day, and time for their dinners; and now there stands in his place a stout, malicious-looking beast, with green breeches, smoking tobacco. Nowhere do things go on so strangely as in the world!" And with that the old woman laughed from the bottom of her heart over the landlord Herr Pomuchelskopp, who stood in his yellow nankeen coat and green plaid trowsers, by the sun-dial, in the very place where the handsome heathen god, Apollo, had stood, only instead of a lyre he had a short pipe in his hand; and yet a shadow often passed over her face when her eyes fell on her handsome, friendly secretary, who had for so many years recorded her doings with his pencil, and now lay among burdocks and nettles in the grass. But she had to laugh again, for all that. Pomuchelskopp laughed also; there were no indications of mirth in his face, but, whenever, from the height which his short stature allowed, he looked around him, he laughed in his heart: "All mine! All mine!" The sunbeam which brightened the world was not noticed by him, it touched neither his face nor his heart; the sunbeam which shone for him was properly a sum in arithmetic, which warmed his heart, but there were no signs of it in his face; there must be a joke, an actual joke, to make him laugh outwardly, and that was not wanting at the present moment.