With satisfaction he saw that they were all sitting there as dry as so many sticks. As things stood now, crocodiles, stags, elephants, and witches could have wept more easily than the heirs, irritated and enraged by Glanz as they were. Only Flachs had a turn of good luck. He thought of Kabel’s good deeds and of the shabby dresses and grey locks of his congregation at early service, then in haste he gave a thought to Lazarus and his dogs and to his own lengthy coffin, then to all the people who have been beheaded at one time or other, the “Sorrows of Werther,” a battle-field; and last he gave a pitiful thought to himself, how young he was, and how he was working and slaving for a miserable paragraph in a testament. Another good heave with his pump-handle and it would fetch him water and a house. “Oh, Kabel, my Kabel,” continued Glanz, almost weeping at the glad prospect of mournful tears, “when on some future day, beside thy precious bosom now covered with dust, my own lies mouldering----” [Illustration: “I BELIEVE, GENTLEMEN, I AM WEEPING.”] “I believe, gentlemen,” said Flachs, getting up sadly and overflowing with tears, “I am weeping.” Thereupon he sat down again and allowed them to run cheerfully down his cheeks; he was high and dry now; he had successfully angled the house away from Glanz, who was very much put out by his efforts, because he had talked away his appetite all to no purpose. Flachs’s emotion was duly registered, and the house in the Hundgasse was legally assigned to him. The burgomaster was gratified that the poor devil should have it. It was the first time in the dukedom of Haslan that the tears of a teacher and preacher, like those of the goddess Freya, had changed into gold. Glanz was profuse in his congratulations, and jocosely reminded Flachs that he himself had perhaps been instrumental in bringing about this happy consummation. _Jean Paul Friedrich Richter_ (1763-1825). _DIVISION OF LABOUR IN MATTERS SENTIMENTAL._