Great was her disenchantment, however, when she actually set eyes on this inn vaunted so much in advance by her addled spirits. For it was located in a small side-street of a rather disreputable quarter of Seldwyla, and the inn itself was one in which the predecessor, one of several that had gone the same way, had just been forcibly ousted because of being unable to pay his debts. His Seldwyla patrons had, in fact, rented this mean public house for a few hundred dollars a year to Manz in consideration of the fact that the latter still had some small sums outstanding in town, and because they could find nobody else to take the place at a venture. They also sold him a few barrels of inferior wine as well as the fixtures which consisted in the main of a couple of dozen glasses and bottles, and of some rude and hacked pine tables and benches that had once been painted a hue of deadly scarlet and were now reduced to a dingy brownish tint. Before the entrance door an iron hoop was clattering in the wind, and inside the hoop a tin hand was pouring out forever claret into a small shoppen vessel. Besides all these luxuries there was a sun-dried bunch of datura fastened above the door, all of which Manz had noted down in his lease. Knowing all this Manz was by no means so full of hopes and smiling humor as his spouse, but on the contrary whipped up his bony old horses, lent him by the new owner of his farm, with considerable foreboding. The last shabby helper he had had on his farm had left him several weeks before, and when he left the village on this his present errand he had not failed to note Marti who, full of grim joy and scorn, had busied himself with some trifling task along the road where his fallen foe had to pass. Manz saw it, cursed Marti, and held him to be the sole cause of his downfall. But Sali, as soon as the cart was fairly on the way, got down, speeded up his steps and reached the town along by-paths.