=A Youthful Dream for Seven Shillings.=--The teacher said: "There are people who carry about with them a measuring-rule for everything. They demand exactness and order; they love perfection in all things. They are called discontented, carping, pedantic. But it is unfair to blame them. If one is content with the mediocre, one will at last only get the worst. Men give only as little as they can, and the whole of life is defective. Conscientious men are not happy, for they cannot lower their demands; they appear to simpletons who have not learnt, that nothing is what it gives itself out to be, that nothing answers the expectations we formed of it. One is inclined to ask whether such men bring with them at birth recollections of a place or a condition where ideal perfection existed. When I was seven years old, I often remained standing fascinated before a music-dealer's shop window, and contemplated a hunter's horn which was hung up there. There was something charming in the proportions of these curved lines. This brass tube tapered off beautifully from the great width of its bell-mouth to its narrowed mouthpiece. In the gloomy street it made me hear nature's music in woods and fields; I loved the instrument. But when a boy told me that it cost thirty shillings, I wondered whether life would ever fulfil my desire, for in order to buy it I would have to go for two and a half years without breakfast. Finally I got to be thirty years old, and had some money to spare for the first time in my life. I bought the hunting-horn; it cost only seven shillings; the boy had told a lie. But the instrument had only three notes. When I got tired of my prize it was consigned to the attic. "It was, at any rate, the fulfilment of a youthful dream!" =Envy Nobody!=--The teacher said: "Envy nobody! As a child I was boarded out in the country in mean surroundings. I lived in a kind of shanty, ate from an earthenware plate, sat on a wooden stool. But there was a castle in the neighbourhood, a real castle, with portraits of kings in the entrance-hall, the ancestors of the young count who lived there. One Sunday we were allowed to go, first into the castle, then into the garden. That was paradise! We could bathe, and were allowed to pick the cherries, blood-black, gold-yellow, fire-red. The count looked on, but ate nothing; he had had enough. Then we left, and the gate of paradise was shut behind us.