the side.  I saw the girl sitting close before the counter by the light, picking over some peas or beans in a wooden bowl.  Before her stood a coarse, powerful man, who looked like a butcher; his jacket was thrown over his shoulders and he held a sort of club in his hand.  The two were talking, evidently in good humor, for the girl laughed aloud several times, but without interrupting her work or even looking up.  Whether it was my unnatural, strained position, or whatever else it may have been, I began to tremble again, when I suddenly felt myself seized by a rough hand from the back and dragged forward.  In a twinkling I was in the store, and when I was released and looked about me, I saw that it was the proprietor himself, who, returning home, had caught me peering through his window and seized me as a suspicious character.  ’Confound it!’ he cried, ’now I understand what becomes of my prunes and the handfuls of peas and barley which are taken from my baskets in the dark.  Damn it all!’ With that he made for me, as though he meant to strike me.

“I felt utterly crushed, but the thought that my honesty was being questioned soon brought me back to my senses.  I therefore made a curt bow and told the uncivil man that my visit was not intended for his prunes or his barley, but for his daughter.  At these words the butcher, who was standing in the middle of the store, set up a loud laugh and turned as if to go, having first whispered a few words to the girl, to which she laughingly replied with a resounding slap of her flat hand upon his back.  The grocer accompanied him to the door.  Meanwhile all my courage had again deserted me, and I stood facing the girl, who was indifferently picking her peas and beans as though the whole affair didn’t concern her in the least.  ‘Sir,’ he said, ’what business have you with my daughter?’ I tried to explain the circumstance and the cause of my visit.  ‘Song!  I’ll sing you a song!’ he exclaimed, moving his right arm up and down in rather threatening fashion.  ‘There it is,’ said the girl, tilting her chair sideways and pointing with her hand to the counter without setting down the bowl.  I rushed over and saw a sheet of music lying there.  It was the song.  But the old man got there first, and crumpled the beautiful paper in his hand.  ‘What does this mean?’ he said.  ‘Who is this fellow?’ ’He is one of the gentlemen from the chancery,’ she replied, throwing a worm-eaten pea a little farther away than the rest.  ‘A gentleman from the chancery,’ he cried, ’in the dark, without a hat?’ I accounted for the absence of a hat by explaining that I lived close by; at the same time I designated the house.  ’I know the house,’ he cried.  ’Nobody lives there but the Court Councilor’—­here he mentioned the name of my father—­’and I know all the servants.’  ’I am the son of the Councilor,’ I said in a low voice, as though I were telling a lie.  I have seen many changes during my life, but none so sudden as that which came