In short, I took this couple one in each hand, instead of under each arm, and moved with them through the garden to the Flachsenfingen highway. I often abruptly turned round my head between them, as if I had heard some one coming after us; but in reality I only meant once more, though mournfully, to look back into the happy hamlet, whose houses were all dwellings of contented still Sabbath-joy, and which is happy enough, though over its wide-parted pavement-stones there passes every week but one barber, every holiday but one dresser of hair, and every year but one hawker of parasols. Then truly I had again to turn round my head, and look at the happy pair beside me. My otherwise affectionate gossip could not rightly suit himself to these tokens of sorrow; but in thy heart, thou good, so oft afflicted sex, every mourning-bell soon finds its unison; and Thiennette, ennobled with the thin trembling _resonance_ of a reverberating soul, gave me back all my tones with the beauties of an echo.---- At last we reached the boundary, over which Thiennette could not be allowed to walk; and now must I part from my gossip, with whom I had talked so gayly every morning (each of us from his bed), and from the still circuit of modest hope where he dwelt, and return once more to the rioting, fermenting Court-sphere, where men in bull-beggar tone demand from Fate a root of Life-Licorice, thick as the arm, like the botanical one on the Wolga, not so much that they may chew the sweet bean themselves, as fell others to earth with it. As I thought to myself that I would say, Farewell! to them, all the coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the marred wishes of this good pair, arose before my heart; and I remembered that little, save the falling asleep of joy-flowers, would mark the current of their Life-day, as it does of mine and of every one's.--And yet is it fairer, if they measure their years not by the _Water-clock_ of falling tears, but by the _Flower-clock_[71] of asleep-going flowers, whose bells in our short-lived garden are sinking together before us from hour to hour.--