He started. "Did you not mean to give up dreaming?" he asked himself, smiling. "Well then, you had better go to bed if you cannot stay awake without dreaming."
CHAPTER II.
Oswald had been a week at Castle Grenwitz, and the week had seemed to him but a day. It was his nature to take up every new thing with a passion, even though the new thing was ordinary enough in itself, and here it was far from being so. He had a new situation, new surroundings, new acquaintances. All this caused him, with his sanguine temper, for a time a most delightful sensation; he found it easy to discover charms, and at least something interesting, in all with whom he came into contact; in the baroness, with her cold, severe features; even in the reticent coachman, against whom he had been so strongly prejudiced on the very first evening; even in the humble familiar servant, with his everlasting: "What are your orders, sir?" The letters which he wrote at this time to his friends all bore the impress of this happy, conciliatory disposition. "Here I am," he said in one of them, "here I am in this new station of my strange life, and upon my word I think I shall stay here, in spite of the impatience for which you blame me so often, until Father Chronos has changed the horses in his stage, and blows his horn once more. If I were not afraid of calling down upon me your bitter irony by my enthusiasm, I might go so far as to thank the kind star that has led me here. I am just in the temper to do so. I have breathed in these days so freely in this air of salt water and forests, that my poor head, filled with the dust of miserable old folios, is quite unsettled. Certainly, if the people here are not altogether unfit for this paradise, I have the finest future for some years to come.
"Pardon me, my dear friend, that I did not ask your special permission before I took the decisive step which brought me here. I have heretofore followed your higher wisdom with implicit obedience, and so you had a right to expect that I should have consulted you first. But I had determined to take this step. I knew you would refuse your consent, and therefore I preferred to meet your full-armed reasons with an equally full-armed fait accompli, so as not to deprive your good advice of its old privilege--to come too late. Besides, the whole thing came so suddenly, and I had to decide so quickly, that I had but just time to inform you of the fact. Finally, Professor Berger is the only cause of the whole proceeding; he has to bear the blame of it, if blame there must be, and him alone I make herewith solemnly responsible for all the consequences.
"We have corresponded but rarely and very briefly, you know, since we parted about a year ago in the capital. Thus I have probably hardly ever mentioned Professor Berger to you, and it is high time to make you acquainted with this original, who has of late played so important a part in my life, and to whom alone I owe it if I did not miserably fail in that principal scene of the tragi-comedy, my examination.
"When I left B-----for Grunwald, in the vague hope of being able to find the necessary repose in this quiet seat of the Muses, with the grass growing in the streets, which I could not obtain amid the literary circles, the æsthetic teas, and musical suppers of the great city, I found here, among the terrible judges who could make me happy or condemn me forever, Professor Berger as the most terrible of all. My poor fellow-sufferers, whose acquaintance I could not avoid making in spite of all my objections, told me really fearful things of his amazing erudition, and much that disquieted me about his eccentricities and droll whimsicalities. They had numerous stories about his great influence over the other members of the Board of Examiners, who were completely overawed by his learning, and still more so by his caustic wit, which spared no one, from the lowest to the highest. I had never yet met the terrible man in person. He had one of his hypochondriac attacks, during which, I was told, he kept himself locked up in his room during the day, and wandered about all night in the woods of the neighborhood.
"One day I received an invitation to dinner from a family to whom I had brought letters of introduction. The company was very numerous; I took a young lady of the house in to dinner, a pretty, fair-haired girl, whose merry ways attracted me exclusively during the first part of the dinner. But when the usual topics which are apt to be discussed with young ladies fresh from school were nearly exhausted, I found my attention engaged by a gentleman who sat opposite me. He was a small, elderly man, with a massive brow, as if cut in granite, from beneath which two clever eyes shone forth brightly. The somewhat full cheeks betrayed a fondness for good living, which was not belied by the earnestness with which the man did honor to the gifts of Ceres and Bacchus. But the lines around the firm, well-shaped mouth were enigmatical: sensuality, wit, humor, and melancholy demons and genii--all seemed to dwell there.
"The conversation at our part of the table soon became general, and I could venture to join in without presumption. They discussed art, literature, and politics. Everywhere the strange man seemed to be perfectly at home; everywhere he surprised us by clever views, startling antitheses, and odd paradoxes. It seemed to give him special pleasure to throw in a little spark of purgatory-fire, and then to see how the tiny flames from below tickled the noses of the good people. Thus he would suddenly assert that revolutions had never done any good to mankind, and never would benefit us. You know my views on this point, which have often been the subject of our discussions. I accepted the challenge; I grew warm in speaking of my pet theme, and all the warmer as my adversary tried hard to confuse me by all kinds of odd questions. I forgot everything around me; I became pathetic, satiric--I felt that I said some good things, at least that I had never in my life spoken as well. At a later day I learnt to my humiliation that the good man had highly enjoyed the sham fight,--for such it was to him,--but then I only noticed that he gave up the combat and listened to what I said, bending his large head a little upon his right shoulder, smiling at my energy out of his large bright eyes beneath the bushy eyebrows, and sipping one glass of hock after the other. Soon afterwards we left the table. As I took my lady back to the room where tea was served, I asked her: 'And who was the gentleman with whom I carried on a conversation, which I fear was very dull to you?'
"'What! you do not know Professor Berger?' the little lady asked, quite amazed.
"'That was Professor Berger?'