Besides the sons of the house, there were in the forefront Hans von Krassow and Frank von Otzen, the two swells of the neighbourhood. The first, a brown and brawny youth of twenty-one, with a long jockey neck and retreating forehead, had been for half a term a Bonn undergraduate, but, on receipt of the first bundle of bills, his father had sent for him home again. Since then he had comported himself as a kind of uncrowned king who, for the rest of his days, expects the whole world to be at his feet. And in the eyes of others, too, the reflected glory of those "kneips" with the Prussians at Bonn cast a nimbus round him. For the rest, he was good company, sportive, and full of lively tricks and whimsicalities, the heart's delight of all the barmaids for six miles round. The other, Frank von Otzen, liked to be taken more seriously. His high ambition had been to go on a foreign embassy, but he had been ploughed in his exam for the diplomatic service, and since was obliged to be content with helping his father to exploit the local coal-mines; but he retained the cryptic monosyllabic phraseology of diplomacy, used French soap, and went to English tailors. He was laughed at for his wide trousers, but nevertheless envied for his air of intimacy with the world of fashion. Then there was the young heir of Neuhaus, an extremely fair, plump stripling, whose clothes, according to "Hinterwald" modes, were too narrow and too tight. He had a pair of big blue eyes in his smooth handsome face, and was so stupid that he was thought to suffer from melancholia, so that Felicitas had chosen him for the confidant of her elegiac moods. Benno von Zesslingen, who had once drunk three gallons unassisted, and Hans von Kleist, of whom there was literally nothing whatever to record, made up the party. These young gentlemen were the cream of Felicitas's train of admirers--"Lizzie's untamed team," as she herself dubbed them. After they had lounged about the door for some time, still longingly expectant that their lovely friend would come to their rescue, Lothair Stolt said it was no use waiting any longer, and contemptuously ignoring the young girls, asked the others to go with him into the garden and start a shooting-match with papa's new pistols. Old Stolt, who, as host, had been daring enough to approach the dangerous corner now and again with a joke, also abandoned the siege, and remembered that Ulrich von Kletzingk had asked his advice as friend and neighbour about a valuable half-bred that was showing signs of going blind after castration. He hastily tasted the bowl of peach-punch that already stood on the ice, and then set out for the stables, where Ulrich, with several of the elder gentlemen, was waiting for him.