I left the house with the idea of just speaking to you and turning back again. HANS. I waited for you.----Virtue is not a bad garment, but it requires an imposing figure. ERNEST. It fits us loosely as yet.----I should not have been content if I had not met you.----I love you, Hans, as I have never loved a soul---- HANS. Let us not be sad.----If we recall this in thirty years, perhaps we shall make fun of it.----And yet everything is so beautiful. The mountains glow; the grapes hang before our mouths and the evening breeze caresses the rocks like a playful flatterer.---- SCENE SEVENTH. _A clear November night. The dry foliage of the bushes and trees rustles. Torn clouds chase each other beneath the moon----Melchior clambers over the churchyard wall._ MELCHIOR. (_Springing down inside._) The pack won't follow me here.----While they are searching the brothels I can get my breath and discover how much I have accomplished. Coat in tatters, pockets empty----I'm not safe from the most harmless.----I must try to get deeper into the wood to-morrow. I have trampled down a cross----Even to-day the flowers are frozen!----The earth is cold all around---- In the domain of the dead!---- To climb out of the hole in the roof was not as hard as this road!----It was only there that I kept my presence of mind---- I hung over the abyss----everything was lost in it, vanished----Oh, if I could have stayed there. Why she, on my account!----Why not the guilty!----Inscrutable providence!----I would have broken stones and gone hungry!----What is to keep me straight now?----Offense follows offense. I am swallowed up in the morass. I haven't strength left to get out of it---- I was not bad!----I was not bad!----I was not bad!----No mortal ever wandered so dejectedly over graves before.----Pah!----I won't lose courage! Oh, if I should go crazy----during this very night! I must seek there among the latest ones!----The wind pipes on every stone in a different key----an anguishing symphony!----The decayed wreaths rip apart and swing with their long threads in bits about the marble crosses----A wood of scarecrows!----Scarecrows on every grave, each more gruesome than the other----as high as houses, from which the devil runs away.----The golden letters sparkle so coldly----The weeping willows groan and move their giant fingers over the inscriptions---- A praying angel----a tablet. The clouds throw their shadows over it.----How the wind hurries and howls!----Like the march of an army it drives in from the east.----Not a star in the heavens---- Evergreen in the garden plot?----Evergreen?----A maiden---- HERE RESTS IN GOD *Wendla Bergmann, born May 5, 1878, died from Cholorosis, October 27, 1892.* *Blessed are the Pure of Heart* And I am her murderer. I am her murderer!----Despair is left me----I dare not weep here. Away from here!----Away---- MORITZ STIEFEL.