pattern, and receive my knobs in their own vacancy. My hint brought
him over at once into the leathern chair opposite the one I occupy.

"Paul, Paul," he said, "I only criticise you for your good. What have
you done with your three adolescences? You are getting stout, yet you
still write poetically. You have some wit, imagination, learning and
aptitude. You might make a name in science or art, but everything
you do lacks substance, because you live only in your old eternal
catchwords of the Past and the Future. You can sketch and paint,
yet have never exhibited your pictures except in ladies' albums.
You profess to love botany, yet your sole herbarium has been the
mignonette in sewing-girls' windows. You are inoffensive, you are
possessed of a competency, but in everything, in every vocation, you
rest in the state of amateur--amateur housekeeper, amateur artist,
amateur traveler, amateur geographer. And such a geographer as
you might be, with your taste for travel and the Hakluyt Society's
publications you have pored over for years!"

This chance allusion to my grand secret took me from my guard.
Hohenfels, blundering up and down in search of something to
anathematize, had stumbled upon the very fortress of my strength.
I deemed it time to let him into a part of my reserved intellectual
treasure--to whirl away a part at least of the sand in which my
patient sphinx had been buried.

"I have indeed been a reader," I said modestly. "When a youth at
Heidelberg, I perused, with more profit than would be immediately
guessed from the titles, such works as the Helden-Buchs and
the Nibelungen-Lieds, the Saxon Rhyme-Chronicles, the poems of
Minnesingers and Mastersingers, and Ships of Fools, and Reynard Foxes,