That was, then, the triumph which she had hoped for from this night! Was this the hospitable house of dear friends, who were so proud of their perfect humanity? or was it a blood-dripping cave of brutal Troglodytes? Was he the interpreter of the fragments of Chrysophilos, or was he not? Was she the famous author of the "Cornflowers," or was she not? And no cry of indignation broke forth from the throats of all who had heard with their own ears this desecration of names so renowned in science and in art! The professor and his wife looked at each other across the table with eyes in which an attentive observer might have read these and other questions; then they glanced around the company at the table to see what impression such blasphemy must needs have produced upon the audience. But no one seemed to think any harm about this disgraceful insult to scientific and poetic fame; no one, with the exception perhaps of fat Doctor Kubel, who replied to an interrogative glance of the professor with a friendly grin, and Oswald, who stealthily pressed Primula's hand under the table as a sign of his sympathy, for Primula sat on his left, while Thusnelda was his right-hand neighbor. Otherwise nobody troubled himself about the insulted sufferers, each one was busy only with his own part, and the impression he hoped to make upon the others, and all awaited now the signal for beginning. The lady manager gave it at once, with the same grace and the same noise with which, in a menagerie, the docile elephant rings the bell for dinner, and the bear or the monkey for supper. Mrs. Clemens presented next, in a neat little speech to Miss Ida Snellius, the offer to "come down, as day was breaking and Mars in the ascendant," whereupon the young lady begged her to "let her observe Venus first, that was just rising and shining in the east like a sun," but her voice was so indistinct as to be almost inaudible, either from the great remoteness of the astronomer or from the embarrassment of the performer. The rest corresponded with this interesting beginning, and they inflicted upon the unlucky drama all the horrors which art-loving ladies and gentlemen are apt to practice when they assemble for the purpose of reading a drama with "distributed parts," as they call it. Rector Clemens changed Wallenstein into the gentle member of a Moravian brotherhood; Professor Snellius, the clever, intriguing Octavio, into a wooden pedant; Doctor Winimer howled and groaned as the noble son of an ignoble father, so that unspeakable horror befell every heart; and Doctor Kubel seemed to take Illo for Chamisso's washerwoman; while Doctor Broadfoot read silent Butler's words as if he had been a charlatan dentist at a fair. Countess Terzky became one of Pappenheim's Cuirassiers; and Thekla, in the hands of Miss Thusnelda, a love-sick seamstress.