Their two lives henceforth resembled the torture of two lost souls who, upon a narrow board, carried along a dark and fearsome river, yet deal tremendous blows at the air, seize upon each other and destroy each other finally, all in the false belief of having seized and trying to destroy their evil fate itself. As their whole matter in dispute was in itself and on both sides not clean or lucid, they soon got into the hands of all sorts of swindlers and cutthroats, of pettifoggers and evil counselors, men who filled their imagination with glittering bubbles, containing no substance whatever. And especially it was the speculators and dishonest agents of Seldwyla who found this case one after their own heart, and soon each of the two litigants had a whole train of advisers, go-betweens and spies around him, fellows who in all sorts of crooked ways knew how to draw cash money out of them. For the quarrel for that tiny fragment of soil with the stone pyramid on top on which already a perfect forest of weeds, thistles and nettles had grown anew, was only the first stage in a labyrinth of errors that little by little changed the whole character and method of living for the two. It was singular, too, how in the case of two men of about fifty there could shoot up and become fixed an entire crop of new habits and morals, principles and hopes, all of a kind which were foreign to their former natures, how men who all their lives had been noted for their hard common-sense could become day-dreamers and gullible oafs. And the more money they lost by all this the more they longed to acquire more, and the less they possessed the more persistently they endeavored to become rich and to shine before their fellows. Thus they easily allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by the clumsiest tricks, and year after year they would play in all the foreign lotteries of which Seldwyla agents were praising to them the splendid chances. But never so much as a dollar came their way in prizes. On the other hand, they forever heard of the big winnings in these lotteries made by others; they also were told that it had hung just by a hair that they would have done as well, and thus they were constantly bled by these leeches of their scantier and scantier means.