Two girls stood waiting there in full Sunday gala, and were thinking of going out into the country to see a parson's daughter, and to the village church; these he first mauled, limb by limb, with the hammer of the law. He loved to make his children antipodes of Romish defendants, who appear in rags and tatters, and so he set them in the pillory, all ruffled and tasselled, especially before strangers. The Count had already this long time, on the red children's account, been standing with his face turned toward the open window; he could not, however, refrain from saying, in Latin, "Were he his child, he would long ago have made way with himself; he knew nothing more degrading than to be scolded in finery." "It takes so much the deeper hold," said Sphex, in German, and fired only these few farewell shots after the girls: "You are a pair of geese, and will do nothing in church but just cackle about your rags and tags; why don't you mind the parson? He is an ass, but he preaches well enough for you she-asses; in the evening do you tell me every word of the sermon." "Here is a laxative drink, Sir Count, which, as you are going to Lilar, I beg you to give the Architect's lady for her little toads; but don't take it ill!" By the deuse! that is what precisely those people most frequently say, who, themselves, never take anything ill. The Count,--who at another time would have contemptuously turned his back upon him,--now blushing and silent before the preserver of his Liana, put it into his pocket, because, too, it was for the children of his beloved Dian, to whose spouse he wished to bear greetings and news. 43. CYCLE. Lilar is not, like so many princely gardens, a torn-out leaf of a Hirschfeld,--a dead landscape-figurant and mimic- and miniature-park,--one of those show-dishes which are now served up and sketched at every court, of ruins, wildernesses, and woodland-cottages, but Lilar is the _lusus naturæ_ and bucolic poem of the romantic and sometimes juggling fancy of the old Prince. We shall soon enter in a body behind our hero, but only into _Elysium_. _Tartarus_ is something entirely different, and the second part of Lilar. This separation of the contrasts I praise even more than all. I have long wanted to go into a better garden than the common chameleonic ones are, where one hands you China and Italy, summer-house and charnel-house, hermitage and palace, poverty and riches (as in the cities and hearts of the proprietors), all on one dish, and where day and night, without an aurora, without a mezzotinto, are placed side by side. Lilar, on the contrary,--where the Elysium justifies its happy name by connected pleasure-tents and pleasure-groves, as the Tartarus does its gloomy one, by lonesome, veiled horrors,--_that_ is drawn right out of my heart.