FLIEGENTOD--If our dear colleague Zungenschlag does not find our sanctum satisfactorily ventilated, I should like to set the machinery in motion toward having a ventilator installed in our dear colleague Zungenschlag’s high and cavernous brow. ZUNGENSCHLAG--Th-th-that is too much for me to put up with!--Ru-rudenesses are more than I need to put up with!--I am in possession of my five senses...! SONNENSTICH--I must request our colleagues, Messrs. Fliegentod and Zungenschlag, to preserve decorum. I think I hear our crime-laden pupil already on the stairs. [HABEBALD _opens the door, whereupon_ MELCHIOR, _pale but composed, steps before the assemblage_.] Step up nearer to the table.--When Mr. Stiefel had been informed of his son’s impious and wicked act, he searched in his grief and perplexity among the effects that his son Moritz had left behind him, in hopes that so he might happen to find the moving cause of that abominable outrage. So doing, he stumbled, in an irrelevant place, upon a piece of writing which, without yet making the abominable outrage understandable in itself, yet offers, I regret to say, an explanation only too conclusive of the moral obliquity in the criminal which must have underlain his act. I am speaking of a twenty-page treatise in dialogue form entitled “Coition,” accompanied by life-sized drawings, rank with the most shameless obscenities, and responding to the most perverted demands that a depraved debauchee could possibly make upon lascivious literature---- MELCHIOR--I have---- SONNENSTICH--You have to keep quiet.--Mr. Stiefel handed this manuscript over to us, and we promised the distracted father at any cost to identify its author. The handwriting was accordingly compared with the hands of each one of the dead profligate’s schoolmates, and it proved, in the unanimous judgment of the whole faculty and in perfect accord with the specialist’s opinion of our esteemed colleague in calligraphy, to have the closest conceivable similarity to yours---- MELCHIOR--I have---- SONNENSTICH--You have to keep quiet.--Notwithstanding the crushing fact that this resemblance has been marked by unimpeachable authorities, we believe that we may refrain for the moment from taking any further steps till we have first circumstantially interrogated the guilty student concerning his crime against morals, in conjunction with the instigation to self-murder arising from it, with which he is accordingly charged. MELCHIOR--I have---- SONNENSTICH--You have to answer to the particular questions which I shall put to you, in order, one after the other, with a simple, modest “Yes” or “No.”--Habebald! HABEBALD--Yes, Mr. Sonnenstich? SONNENSTICH--The documents!--I trust that our Secretary, Mr. Fliegentod, will from now on record the proceedings as nearly verbatim as possible. [_To_ MELCHIOR.] Do you recognize this manuscript? MELCHIOR--Yes. SONNENSTICH--Do you know what this manuscript contains? MELCHIOR--Yes.