work is done, they have been rewarded or punished, paid with praise and
gold or mulcted in the sum of their reputation and estate. Famous or
infamous, in honour or in disrepute, in riches or in poverty, they have
reached the end of their time, they are worn out, the world will have no
more of them, they are worthless in the price-scale of men, they must be
buried out of sight and they will be forgotten out of mind. The beginning
is the same for all, and the end also, and as for the future, who shall
tell us upon what basis of higher intelligence our brief passage across
the stage is to be judged? Why then should the present trouble our vanity
so greatly? And if our play is of so little importance, why should we care
whether the scenery is romantic instead of commonplace, or why should we
make furious efforts to shift a Gothic castle, a drawbridge, a moat and a
waterfall into the slides occupied by the four walls of a Munich
tobacconist's shop?

There is not even anything especial in the appearance of the place to
recommend it to the ready pen of the word-painter. It is an establishment
of very modest pretensions situated in one of the side streets leading to
a great thoroughfare. As we are in Munich, however, the side street is
broad and clean, the pavement is well swept and the adjoining houses have
an air of solid respectability and wealth. At the point where the street
widens to an irregular shape on the downward slope there is a neat little
iron kiosque completely covered with brilliant advertisements, printed in
black Gothic letters upon red and yellow paper. The point of vivid colour
is not disagreeable, for it relieves the neutral tints of brick and brown
stone, and arrests the eye, long wearied with the respectable parade of
buildings. The tobacconist's shop is, indeed, the most shabby, or, to
speak more correctly, the least smartly new among its fellow-shops,
wherein dwell, in consecutive order, a barber, a watchmaker, a
pastry-cook, a shoemaker and a colour-man. In spite of its unattractive