"Yet we also have our culture," replied Mr. Hummel. "Gabriel, you have spoken like an honorable man, but I will confide this to you--that a man may have great knowledge, and yet be a very hard-hearted individual, who loans his money on usurious interest and deprives his friends of the honor due them. Therefore I think the main point is to have order and boundaries, and to leave something to one's descendants. Regularity here," he pointed to his breast, "and a boundary there," pointing to his fence, "that one may be sure as to what belongs to one's self and what to another, and a secure property for one's children on which they may settle themselves. That is what I understand as the life of man." The householder locked the gate of the fence and the door of the house. Gabriel also sought his bed, but the lamp in the Professor's study burned late into the night, and its rays intermingled on the windowsill with the pale moonshine. At length the Scholar's light was extinguished, and the room left empty; outside, small clouds coursed over the disk of the moon, and flickering lights reigned paramount in the room, over the writing-table, over the works of the old Romans, and over the little book of the defunct Brother Tobias. _CHAPTER II_. THE HOSTILE NEIGHBORS. We are led to believe that in future times there will be nothing but love and happiness; and men will go about with palm branches in their hands to chase away the last of those birds of night, hatred and malice. In such a chase we would probably find the last nest of these monsters hanging between the walls of two neighboring houses. For they have nestled between neighbor and neighbor ever since the rain trickled from the roof of one house into the court of the other; ever since the rays of the sun were kept away from one house by the wall of the other; ever since children thrust their hands through the hedge to steal berries; ever since the master of the house has been inclined to consider himself better than his fellow-men. There are in our days few houses in the country between which so much ill-will and hostile criticism exist as between the two houses near the great city park.