Alarmed at the very thought of having a lodger up in the attic who was practising black magic, Frau Hadebusch sent her husband down to the district policeman. This enlightened official declared that the brush-maker was a gossip. Vexed at this unanticipated description of himself, the brush-maker went straightway to the inn at the sign of the Horse and got drunk, so drunk that Benjamin Dorn had to take him home. It was a beautiful moonlit night. IV Not far from Hadebusch’s was a little café known as The Paradise. Everything in it was diminutive, the proprietor, the waitress, the tables, the chairs and the portions. There the brethren from the Vale of Tears assembled to drag the gods down into the dust and destroy the universe in general. Daniel wended his way thither. He knew the liliputian room and the starved faces. He was personally acquainted with the painter who never painted, the writer who never wrote, the student who never studied, and the inventor who never invented anything. He knew all about the sculptor who squandered such talents as he may have had in tinkering with plaster casts, the actor who had been on a leave of absence for years, and the half dozen mendicant Philistines who came here day after day to have a good time in their own repelling fashion. He knew the young Baron von Auffenberg who had broken with his family for reasons that were clear to no one but himself. He knew Herr Carovius, who invariably played the rôle of the observer, and who sat there in a sort of mysterious fashion, smiling to himself a smile of languishing irony, and stroking his hand over his long hair, which was cut straight across at the back of his neck. He knew, ah, he knew by heart, the grease spots on the walls that had been rubbed in by the heads of the habitués, the indelible splotches on the tables, the hartshorn buttons on the proprietor’s vest, and the smoke-coloured curtains draped about the tiny windows. The loud, boisterous talking, the daily repetition of the same hackneyed remarks, the anarchistic swashbuckling of the painter whom his comrades had dubbed Kropotkin—all of these were familiar stories to him. He knew the philosophic cynicism of the student who felt that he was the Socrates of the nineteenth century, and who looked back on twenty-five wasted semesters as on so many battles fought and won.