But there came a sudden change over all this, for one morning when we awoke in Duesseldorf and wanted to say, “Good morning, father!” the father had traveled away, and in the whole town there was nothing but dumb sorrow.  Everywhere there was a sort of funereal atmosphere, and people crept silently through the market and read the long placard placed on the door of the City Hall.  The weather was dark and lowering, yet the lean tailor Kilian stood in the nankeen jacket, which he generally wore only at home, and in his blue woolen stockings, so that his little bare legs peeped out dismally, and his thin lips quivered as he murmured the words of the placard to himself.  An old invalid soldier from the Palatine read it in a somewhat louder tone, and at certain phrases a transparent tear ran down his white, honorable old mustache.  I stood near him, and wept with him, and then asked why we wept; and he replied, “The Prince Elector has abdicated.”  Then he read further, and at the words “for the long-manifested fidelity of my subjects,” “and hereby release you from your allegiance,” he wept still more.  It is a strange sight to see, when so old a man, in faded uniform, with a scarred veteran’s face, suddenly bursts into tears.  While we read, the Princely Electoral coat-of-arms was being taken down from the City Hall, and everything began to appear as oppressively desolate as though we were waiting for an eclipse of the sun.  The city councilors went about at an abdicating, slow gait; even the omnipotent beadle looked as though he had had no more commands to give, and stood calmly indifferent, although the crazy Aloysius again stood upon one leg and chattered the names of French generals, with foolish grimaces, while the tipsy, crooked Gumpertz rolled around the gutter, singing, “Ca ira!  Ca ira!” But I went home, weeping and lamenting because “the Prince Elector had abdicated!” My mother tried hard to comfort me, but I would hear nothing.  I knew what I knew, and went weeping to bed, and in the night dreamed that the world had come to an end—­that all the fair flower gardens and green meadows were taken up from the ground and rolled away, like carpets; that a beadle climbed up on a high ladder and took down the sun, and that the tailor Kilian stood by and said to himself, “I must go home and dress myself neatly, for I am dead and am to be buried this afternoon.”  And it grew darker and darker—­a few stars glimmered meagrely on high, and these too, at length, fell down like yellow leaves in autumn; one by one all men vanished, and I, poor child, wandered around in anguish, and finally found myself before the willow fence of a deserted farmhouse, where I saw a man digging up the earth with a spade, and near him an ugly, spiteful-looking woman, who held something in her apron like a human head—­but it was the moon, and she laid it carefully in the open grave—­and behind me stood the Palatine invalid, sighing, and spelling out “The Prince Elector has abdicated.”