tell you when it comes to the point.  So I went away quietly and got old Metz, the surgeon at Rahnstaedt, to draw out the stings.  That was the end of the water-cure; still it’s a good thing; one gets new ideas in a place like that, and even if one’s gout is not cured, one gains some notion of what a human being can suffer.  And now, Charles, this is a water-book I have brought you, you can study it in the winter-evenings.”

[Three more years had passed, and Louisa Hawermann at the parsonage was repaying her father’s and her foster parents’ love and care by growing up the loveliest girl of the neighborhood.  Uncle Braesig, to be sure, would have qualified this by saying “next to his two round-heads.”  No qualification, however, was justified in the eyes of Frank von Rambow and Fred Triddelfitz, the two young men studying agriculture under Hawermann.  They fell in love with her, each after his own fashion.  Frank deeply and lastingly, Fred—­whom uncle Braesig loved to call the “gray hound”—­ardently if not irretrievably.  This, however, he did not know, and as he felt his blood seething, he was thoroughly wretched.]

No human being can stand more than a certain amount of pain, after that it becomes unbearable and a remedy must be found; now the only remedy a lover finds effectual is an interview with his sweetheart.  Matters had come to such a pass with Fred that he could no longer exist without seeing Louisa, so he began to lie in wait for her in all sorts of holes and corners.  Every hollow-tree was a good hiding-place from which he could watch for her coming, every ditch was of use in concealing his advance, every hill was a look-out from which he could sweep the country with his gaze, and every thicket served him for an ambush.  He was so much in earnest that he could not fail to succeed in his attempts to see her, and he often gave Louisa a great fright by pouncing out upon her, when she least expected him, and when she was perhaps thinking of * * * we will not say Frank.  Sometimes he was to be seen rearing his long slight figure out of a bush like a snake in the act of springing, sometimes his head would appear above the green ears of rye like a seal putting its head above water, and sometimes as she passed under a tree he would drop down at her side from the branches where he had been crouched like a lynx waiting for its prey.  At first she did not mind it much, for she looked upon it as a new form of his silly practical joking, and so she only laughed and talked to him about some indifferent subject; but she soon discovered that a very remarkable change had taken place in him.  He spoke gravely and solemnly and uttered the merest nothings as if they had been the weightiest affairs of state.  He passed his hand meditatively across his forehead as if immersed in profound thought, and when she spoke of the weather, he laid his hand upon his heart as if he were suffering from a sudden pain in the side.  When she asked him to come to Guerlitz he shook his