first months I spent there brought days of suffering with fever in the
afternoon, and nights whose condition was no less torturing than pain.

But our physician had been present at my birth, he was my godfather, and
as kind as if I were his son. He did everything in his power to relieve
me, but the remedies he used were not much easier to bear than many a
torturing disease. And hardest of all, I was ordered to keep perfectly
still in bed. What a prospect! But when I had once resolved to follow
the doctor's advice, I controlled with the utmost care every movement of
my body. I, who had so often wished to fly, lay like my own corpse. I
did not move, for I did not want to die, and intended to use every means
in my power to defer the end. Death, which after the haemorrhage had
appeared as the beautiful winged boy who is so easily mistaken for the
god of love--Death, who had incited me to write saucy, defiant verses
about him, now confronted me as a hollow-eyed, hideous skeleton.

In the guise of the most appalling figure among the apocalyptic riders
of Cornelius, who had used me when a child for the model of a laughing
angel, he seemed to be stretching his hand toward me from his emaciated
steed. The poppy leaf was not to flutter toward the sky, but to wither
in the dust.

Once, several weeks after our return home, I saw the eyes of my mother,
who rarely wept, reddened with tears after a conversation with Dr.
Romberg. When I asked my friend and physician if he would advise me to
make my will, he said that it could do no harm.

Soon after Hans Geppert, who meanwhile had become a notary, arrived with
two witnesses, odd-looking fellows who belonged to the working class, and
I made my will in due form. The certainty that when I was no more what I