tenor, whom in his youth, he had heard and admired; while the little withered old woman, his wife, had, in her time, been a no less celebrated actress. They had already been pensioned twelve years, and, without song or noise of any kind, spent their quiet days in their tiny rooms, adorned with faded laurel-wreaths and pictures of their famous colleagues. These celebrities, according to the ideas of the proprietor, gave to his little house a certain artistic reputation, and if there were customers in the shop at noon when the old couple returned from their walk, he never failed to direct attention to them and with boastful assurance to revive the fame of the two forgotten and very shrivelled great personages. On the ground floor was the shop, over which a black sign bore the inscription in gilt letters: "Boot & Shoe Making Done by Gottfried Feyertag." The shoemaker had ordered the large brown boot and red slipper, which had originally been painted on the right and left side, to be effaced, because it annoyed him to see them, when they no longer represented the fashion. He kept up with the times in his trade, and could not possibly alter his sign at every change of style. The shop, he generally left to the management of his wife he himself spending most of the day in the workroom, where he kept a sharp eye on his four or five journeymen. A narrow entry led past the shop into a small, well-kept courtyard, in whose centre stood a tall acacia-tree, three quarters of which had died for want of air and sunlight, so that only its topmost branches were still adorned with a few pale green, consumptive-looking leaves, which every autumn turned yellow some weeks before any other foliage. Here, in one corner, beside the pump, an arbor had been erected by the head journeyman, for the daughter of the house, when a school-girl; it consisted of a few small poles roughly nailed together, and now overgrown with bean-vines, which bloomed most dutifully every summer, but in the best years never produced more than a handful of stunted pods. A little bed along the so-called sunny side of the house contained all sorts of plants that seek the shade, and thrive luxuriantly around cisterns and cellars; and in midsummer, when the sun actually sent a few rays into the courtyard at noonday, the little spot really looked quite gay, especially if the fair-haired Reginchen, now a young girl of seventeen, were seated there reading--if it chanced to be a Sunday--some tale of robbers from a book obtained at a circulating library.