The music passed away; the lamps were extinguished. Quietly as they had come the crowds went away. It was dark again in the street; but in the hearts of those who were standing up-stairs in the bay-window, holding each; other in close embrace, it was bright, like a sunny morning in May. CHAPTER VIII. The great woods of Berkow are leafless. Where formerly birds were singing in the green twilight, and beetles and midges humming drowsily there the cold autumnal winds are now whistling through the bare branches; and where dry leaves are yet hanging on old oak-trees, they no longer whisper to each other lovingly as in the beautiful summer time, but rustle weird and woefully. Only the evergreens look as if the season could do them no harm; but their fine foliage also is darker, and they look now, when all around is bare, blacker and more dismal than ever. Rough autumn has blown through the thick yew-hedge and into the garden behind the castle, has swept the flowers from the whole parterre, and filled the trim walks with withered wet leaves. On the terrace, under the broad branching pine-tree, the favorite place of the mistress of the house, the little round table with the marble slab is still standing, because it is deeply rooted in the ground, but the green benches and chairs have been carried into the garden-house. The open place before the house, which is divided off by a railing from the farm-buildings, looks melancholy. The shutters on this side of the house are almost always closed, and are only now and then opened by a wrinkled old hand, whereupon often, as just now for instance, the wrinkled old face that belongs to the hand, with its icy gray moustache, looks out for a few minutes to watch a wagon heavily laden with wood, which four powerful horses can hardly drag through the deep mud at the side entrance to the yard between two barns, where even in summer the passage is often quite dangerous. The old man contracts his brows angrily as he sees the servant whip the horses furiously, amid calls and cries and curses. He grumbles something about 'infamous fellow' in his gray beard; but he no longer raises his voice to give vent to a powerful oath or so, as he used to do; for after all it is not the servant's fault, but the tenant's, who has not been prevailed upon these five years to mend the road. This tenant is every way a vessel of wrath for the old man. He keeps his cattle in bad order; he is cruel to his hands; in the third place he knows, according to the old man's notions, nothing of farming; and, finally, he has a red nose, and is always hoarse, two peculiarities attributed to brandy, and equally disgusting to the old man's eyes and ears. And, above all, the terrible prospect of never losing sight of this man for the whole of his life (for his term has twenty years more to run, and the old man is not going to live so long); to have to drag him along, so to say, till