These last did so affirm what they said that I now began almost entirely to believe them, and they did so move my curiosity that I determined to visit this wondrous lake. But of those that with me had listened to the whole story one judged one way and another another, from which sufficiently appeared their different and contradictory ways of thinking. For my part I said the German name Mummelsee[40] sufficiently declared that there was about the thing, as about a masquerade, some disguise, so that none might fathom either its nature or its depth, which had never yet been discovered, though such high personages had attempted it. And with that I betook me to the same place where a year before I had seen my departed wife for the first time and drank in the sweet poison of love. And there I laid myself down on the green grass in the shade, yet took no heed as I had done before to what the nightingales did sing, but rather pondered on the changes I had suffered since then. I represented to myself how in that very place I had begun to be in place of a free man a slave of love, and how since then I had become from an officer a peasant, from a rich peasant a poor nobleman, from a Simplicissimus a Melchior, from a widower a husband, from a husband a cuckold, and from a cuckold a widower again; moreover, from a peasant's brat I had proved to be the son of a good soldier, and yet again the son of my old dad. Then again I reflected how fate had robbed me of my Herzbruder, and in his place had provided me with two old married folk. I thought of the godly life and decease of my father; the piteous death of my mother; and, further, of the manifold changes which I had undergone in my lifetime, till I could no longer refrain myself from tears. And even while I reflected how much good money I in my lifetime had possessed and squandered away, and began to lament therefore, there came two good soakers or winebibbers on whom the gout had fastened in their limbs, whereby they were crippled and needed both the baths and to drink the waters: these set themselves down by me, for 'twas a fair place to rest, and each bewailed to the other his sad case as thinking that they were alone. So said the one, "My doctor hath sent me here either as one of whose healing he despaired or else as one that with others might help him to repay my host here for the keg of butter he sent him: I would I had either never seen him in my life or else that he had at the first sent me to the spa, for so should I either have more money than now or else be sounder, for the waters suit my case right well." And "Ah" says the other, "I thank my God that He hath given me no more money to spare than what I have, for had my doctor known that I had more behind he had never counselled me to come to the spa; but I must have shared all between him and his apothecaries, that for this cause do oil his palms year by year--yea, even though I should have died and perished in the meanwhile.