"Then we must think of something else," answered Justus; "so smart a vessel must not be left to rot in the stagnant waters of a port. For the present you can sit to me occasionally as a model for my bas-relief; not that I want you yet, but one must gather the roses ere they fade. I will take your head now at once, life-size, to be sure of you in any case." Justus set aside all other work, and busied himself over the designs for his bas-reliefs from morning till night, which came only too early for the busy worker. Two of them, the "March out" and the "Battle," were already finished, and the "Ambulance preparations" had made great progress; but what was to be done about the "Return"? Heaven only knew! "And the idea was such a splendid one," cried Justus. "You had been promoted to be an officer meanwhile, and were to be standing at attention in the right corner, your eyes left towards the charming burgomaster's daughter, who, with the wreath in her hand, also turned her eyes right towards the smart lieutenant, while the two elders exchanged the most beautiful sentiments about union, peace, fraternity, and the like. Heaven help us! beautiful sentiments they have exchanged certainly! Those confounded politics! for after all they are at the bottom of all this trouble. Why must that old Berserker go running about upon the barricades in '48! And he calls himself a Liberal now, and bottles up his anger for four and twenty years, and so spoils my splendid idea, for the idea was fairly embodied in those two. Who the devil is to make bas-reliefs from disembodied ideas! I, for one, can't do it; I gladly renounce the doubtful glory of being an inventor; my motto is: 'Seek, and you shall find!' I have held by it, and it has held by me. I have always found just what I wanted for the moment; it has fairly fallen in my way, I must have been blind not to see it; and this time it was just as if Abdallah's wonderful cave had opened before me: 'Diamonds, emeralds, rubies, only the way between them is narrow ... the camels laden almost beyond their strength;' and now--just turn a little more to the right, my good fellow!--'one only, the last, remained to the dervish.' Admirable, my dear Reinhold, but, excepting you, every one of my splendid models has left me in the lurch; Uncle Ernst, the General, Ferdinanda--absolutely impossible! Aunt Rikchen declares that in such a time of trouble she cannot have anything to do with such nonsense--it would be quite wicked!--is not that good? Old Grollmann's face, I positively cannot see through his melancholy wrinkles; our worthy Kreisel, since he has given up Socialism and taken to speculation, has shrivelled up into a mere grasshopper; dear Cilli even has only occasionally the sweet smile with which, gift in hand, she was to grope for the superintendent's table; and among the new workmen I cannot find a single decent model. A parcel of stupid, coarse, sullen faces; and all comes from politics--those confounded politics!"