Fortunately, the passers-by did not overhear the verdict of this court of censure, which sought to ostracise them from all good society: they walked along the village street. Tents were set up before the fishermen's cottages, beneath which the bathing nomads had taken up their abode. Here a young girl was reading George Sand's newest romance, or Doctor Schöner's poems, little attractive to a female mind as was the young lyrist's daring suggestion of turning the bells into cannon, naturally for the army of liberty which should blow the world out of its grooves. There a young man without any upper light, was attempting to execute a painting of the Samland Sea; the old gentleman, who, in his shirt-sleeves, gazes out of a narrow window in one of the fishermen's cottages, is a Privy Councillor, who had almost attained to being "his excellency:" and yonder, on the bench, in the arbour, if a little erection of boards merits that poetical name, sat one of the most admired beauties from the capital, her embroidery lying idle on her lap, while she herself gazed with dreamy eyes after the goose-herd who drove the unrenowned sisters of the Capitoline celebrities through the village street. Doctor Kuhl, with his fair friends, had left the village behind him, and found a retired spot beneath whispering birches close by the surging sea, below in the "hollow way." No inconvenient watchers disturbed them here at this hour of the day; it was as still in the hot sun as it usually only is on a cool, moonlight night. "Here by the sacred, briny waves of Homer," cried the Doctor, "by the syrens and nereïdes and all the goddesses of the classical Walpurgis-night, I feel within me some of the blood of the dwellers in Olympus, who allowed themselves to be enchanted by beauty and love whenever the latter met them triumphantly. Poor Paris, who had only an apple for one goddess, instead of for all three at once! Yet all were worthy of the prize, and it was lamentable to grant to two only the second best. We three, dear Olga, my Cäcilie, we three form a beautiful union which the world does not understand how to respect!" "You must allow yourself to understand, that you only actually love Olga!" remarked Cäcilie. Doctor Kuhl sprang up indignantly. "Any one hearing you speak in that manner would believe you to be jealous. Jealousy--that fruit of an odious narrow-mindedness, this inculcated social vice, which must always be alien to every natural emotion! Nothing irritates me so much as when I perceive tokens of jealousy in reasonable beings. Jealousy is a natural daughter of envy; but, alas! it has been legitimatised by society." "On the contrary, dear Paul," replied Cäcilie, "it arises from an inherent feeling which belongs, more or less, to all mankind."