"Now, Mabel," I murmured, "now I shall see you as you are."
III.
At three o'clock in the afternoon I knocked at the door of the professor's study.
"Come in," said the professor.
"Is—is Mabel at home?" asked I, when I had shaken hands with the professor and seated myself in one of his hard, straight-backed chairs.
"She will be down presently," answered he "There is The Nation. You may amuse yourself with that until she comes."
I took up the paper; but the spectacles seemed to be burning in my breast-pocket, and although I stared intently at the print, I could hardly distinguish a word. What if I tried the power of the spectacles on the professor? The idea appeared to me a happy one, and I immediately proceeded to put it into practice. With a loudly beating heart, I pulled the silver case from my pocket, rubbed the glasses with my handkerchief, put them on my nose, adjusted the bows behind my ears, and cast a stealthy glance at the professor over the edge of my paper. But what was my horror! It was no longer the professor at all. It was a huge parrot, a veritable parrot in slippers and dressing-gown! I dared hardly believe my senses. Was the professor really not a man, but a parrot? My dear trusted and honored teacher, whom I had always looked upon as the wisest and most learned of living men, could it be possible that he was a parrot? And still there he sat, grave and sedate, a pair of horn spectacles on his large, crooked beak, a few stiff feathers bristling around his bald crown, and his small eyes blinking with a sort of meaningless air of confidence, as I often had seen a parrot's eyes doing.
"My gnome has been playing a trick on me," I thought. "This is certainly not to see things as they are. If I only had his tarn-cap once more, he should not recover it so cheaply."
"Well, my boy," began the professor, as he wheeled round in his chair, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe on the polished andirons which adorned the empty fire-place. "How is the world using you? Getting over your German whims, eh?"