to me in this world, so that we shall not have the fleeting pleasure
of a couple of weeks together, would, indeed, be incredibly severe. I
am all excitement; that is our share in the newly achieved
liberty--that I am to be forced to spend my few days of freedom
sitting in judgment over thievish tramps of Jews, like a prisoner in a
fortress. I hope Gerlach can free me; otherwise I shall never speak to
him again. Tomorrow I shall at once drop you a line from Magdeburg, to
tell you how I succeed. * * * The people have abandoned the
dike-captain conspiracy against me; the Town Councillor says he will
not press it at all. He chattered to me for hours about his land-tax
commission, in which his anxiety drove him to rage against his own
flesh, and also, unfortunately, against ours. Our chief misfortune is
the cowardly servility towards those above and the chasing after
popularity below, which characterize our provincial councillor;
consequently public business, the chase, land-tax, etc., are all
deleteriously affected. It is due principally to the fact that he is
grossly ignorant and bungling in affairs, and is, therefore, for
better, for worse, in the hands of his democratic circuit secretary,
to whom he never dares to show his teeth; and, despite all that, the
fellow wears trousers, has been a soldier, and is a nobleman. La-Croix
is district-attorney at Madgeburg, withal, and he, too, must help me
to sneak out of it. It is still impossible for me to acquiesce in the
notion that we are to be separated all winter, and I am sick at heart
whenever I think of it; only now do I truly feel how very, very much
you and the _babies_ are part of myself, and how you fill my being.
That probably explains why it is that I appear cold to all except you,
even to mother; if God should impose on me the terrible affliction of
losing you, I feel, so far as my feelings can at this moment grasp and
realize such a wilderness of desolation, that I would then cling so to
your parents that mother would have to complain of being persecuted