MORITZ--It is better so.--I don’t fit in. Let them mount and climb upon each other’s heads.--I will pull the door to behind me, and step into the open. I won’t pay so much just to let myself be pushed around. I didn’t put myself forward. Why should I put myself forward now?--I have no compact with God. Let them distort the thing any way they have a mind to. I was pressed.--I don’t say my parents are responsible. After all, they had to be prepared for the worst. They were old enough to know what they were doing. I was an infant when I came into the world--otherwise even I might have been cunning enough to become another person. Why should I pay the penalty for all the others’ being there already! I suppose I must have fallen on my head.... If anyone gives me a present of a mad dog, I give him his mad dog back; and if he won’t take his mad dog back, then I am humane and.... Yes, I just must have fallen on my head! One is born quite by accident, and yet, after the most mature consideration, one is not supposed to---- It’s enough to make one shoot one’s self dead! At least the weather shows that it sympathizes. All day it’s looked like rain, but it’s still holding off.--A rare peace is brooding over nature: nowhere anything sharp or exciting; heaven and earth like a transparent spider’s-web. And everything seems to feel so well. The landscape lovely as a lullaby--“Schlafe, mein Prinzchen, schlaf’ ein,” as Fraülein Snandulia sang. Too bad she holds her elbows awkwardly!--It was at the feast of St. Cecilia I danced for the last time. Snandulia only dances at parties. Her silk dress was cut so low, back and front--behind down to the belt at her waist, and in front low enough to take away your wits.--She can’t have had a chemise on.... That would be something that might stop me yet!--More just for curiosity.--It must be an extraordinary sensation--a feeling as if one were being swept down a torrent---- I shan’t tell anybody that I’ve come back with the thing undone. I shall act as if I had taken part in all that.... It’s rather mortifying, to have been human and not got to know the most human thing of all.--You come from Egypt, my dear sir, and have not seen the =pyramids=?! I don’t want to cry again to-day. I don’t want to think any more about my funeral---- Melchior will lay a wreath upon my casket; Pastor Kahlbauch will console my parents; old Sonnenstich will cite parallels from history.--A gravestone I probably won’t get. I should have liked an urn of snowy marble on a black syenite base,--but, praise God, I shan’t miss it! Memorials are for the living, not for the dead.