The young fellow laughed aloud at this strange mixture of despair and dread of taking cold.
"Well, then, sit in the sun," he said, still laughing. "I prefer the shade, since a cold is of no consequence to me. And now, since we find ourselves comrades after this odd fashion, here at our ease, you can initiate me in the dark mysteries of your life. I promise you an attentive listener."
He had thrown himself down beneath a huge beech-tree, while his companion was looking for a seat on some stone in the blazing sunshine.
"My wet clothes will soon dry here," said the singer. "When they are dried on the body they do not lose their shape." And as he spoke he looked down sadly at the long wet tails of his coat as they draggled dripping behind him. There was no trace to be seen in him of the contrition and despair which had possessed him a few moments since, his whole mind was given to the choosing of a spot in the sunshine. At last he found a fragment of rock which suited him, he sat down upon it, and leaning forward propped his elbows upon his knees and his chin upon his hands. In this attitude he looked, as his companion could not but inwardly observe, like a strange caricature of incredible ugliness. He paused a while to reflect, and then began, in a whining, lachrymose tone,--
"I have always been a child of misfortune. The Lord has punished me with the greatest severity for my sins, although I have tried to lead a pious, resigned life, however heavily His hand might be laid upon me. Wherefore, O Lord, shouldst Thou thus visit Thy most devoted servant----"
He could not go on, for his listener had stopped his ears, and exclaimed angrily, "Stop, stop! nothing in the world is quite so detestable and tiresome as circumlocution. If I am to listen, you must be brief, simple, and unaffected. Let us have no whining sentimentality. I hate it! Give me a clear, simple statement of facts."
"Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh," was the reply to this blunt interruption of the man's flow of eloquence. "I will command my emotion, if I can, out of regard for you, my preserver. I have always been unlucky; my very name was a misfortune,--not my first name, Gottlieb, which I received in holy baptism, but my surname, Pigglewitch. I always see a smile of derision upon the lips of those who hear it for the first time, when a boy I was always laughed at for my name, and this trial has never left me. But I will not murmur; it is the Lord's will that I inherit such a title, and His ways are always right. How can we, weak mortals that we are----"
"Hold, friend Pigglewitch! You are forgetting again. No preaching!"
"I have done," Gottlieb Pigglewitch replied, instantly subsiding into an ordinary narrative style. "My father was pastor of Wilhelmshagen. I scarcely remember him, he died when I was not quite six years old; my mother had died at my birth, and her brother now took me home, or rather kept me in my home, for he succeeded to my father's position. He said he befriended the orphan for the love of God, but he never showed me any affection, even as a little child I had to work hard for my daily food, he employed me to tend first his geese and afterwards his sheep. I was sent with the other village children to the village school, but as soon as I came home I had to work for my uncle, and the dread of a beating often made me perform tasks that were far beyond my strength. I was given many a blow, with very little to eat, and never a kind word; my uncle declared that I was a good-for-nothing, lazy young hypocrite and liar, who could not be treated too severely, I was fit for nothing but a stupid tiller of the ground. As such he meant to bring me up, but Herr Brandes, the Schulze of Wilhelmshagen, befriended me. He had been a friend of my father's, and would have taken me into his house and brought me up with his daughter Annemarie, who is two years younger than I, only he did not wish to interfere with my uncle.
"Nevertheless he stood my friend, and often when I was very hungry I got a good meal at his house; little Annemarie, too, would sometimes bring a piece of bread out to me in the fields and stay a while and play with me. Those were the only happy hours I can remember as a child. It was a time of sore trial, and I, unworthy sinful man----"