its most beautiful plaits. This was a strong ground for indignation to Mr. Hummel, but worse was to come. He saw the daily progress of the hostile house; he watched the scaffolding, the rising walls, the ornaments of the cornice, and the rows of windows--it was two windows higher than his house. The ground floor rose, then a second floor, and at last a third. All the work-rooms of the straw hat manufacturer were attached to the dwelling. The house of Mr. Hummel had sunk into insignificance. He then went to his lawyer and demanded redress for the obstruction of his light and the view from his residence; the man of law naturally shrugged his shoulders. The privilege of building houses was one of the fundamental rights of man; it was the common German custom to live in houses, and it was obviously hopeless to propose that Hahn should only erect on his piece of ground a canvas tent. Thus there was absolutely nothing to do but to submit patiently, and Mr. Hummel might have known that himself. Years had passed away. At the same hour the light of the sun gilds both houses; there they stand stately and inhabited, both occupied by men who daily pass each other. At the same hour the letter-carrier enters both houses, the pigeons fly from one roof to the other, and the sparrows hop around on the gutters of both, in the most cordial relations. About one house there is sometimes a faint smell of sulphur, and about the other, of singed hair; but the same summer wind wafts from the wood, through the doors of both dwellings, the scent of the pine-trees and the perfumes of the lime-flowers. And yet the intense aversion of the inhabitants has not diminished. The house of Hahn objects to singed hair, and the family of Hummel cough indignantly in their garden whenever they suspect sulphur in the oxygen of the air. It is true that decorous behavior to the neighborhood was not quite ignored; and though the felt was inclined to be quarrelsome, the straw was more pliant, and showed itself tractable in many cases. Both men were acquainted with a family in which they occasionally met, nay, both had once been godfathers to the same child, and care had been taken that one should not give a smaller christening gift than the other. This unavoidable acquaintance necessitated formal greetings whenever they could not avoid meeting each other. But there it ended. Between the shopmen who cleaned the straw hats with sulphur, and the workmen, who presided over the hare-skins, there existed an intense hatred. And the people who dwelt in the nearest houses in the street knew this, and did their best to maintain the existing relation. But, in fact, the character of both would scarcely harmonize. Their dialect was different, their education had been different, the favorite dishes and the domestic arrangements that were approved by one displeased the other. Hummel was of North German lineage; Hahn had come hither from a small town in the neighborhood.