a little, the better to hear the music, and the clatter of plates and the smell of the roast float out through the chink, and the young misses at table well-nigh twist their necks off to see the musicians outside.”  “That’s true!” exclaimed the cornetist, with sparkling eyes.  “Let who will pore over their compendiums, we choose to study in the vast picture-book which the dear God spreads open before us!  Yes, the gentleman may believe me, we make the right sort of fellows, who know how to preach to the peasants from the pulpit and to bang the cushion, so that the clodpoles down below are ready to burst with humiliation and edification.”

At hearing them talk thus, I became so pleased and interested that I longed to be a student too.  I could have listened forever, for I enjoy the conversation of men of learning, from whom much is to be gained.  But we had no real, sensible conversation, for one of the students was worried because the vacation was so nearly at an end.  He put his clarionet together, set up a sheet of music on his knees, and began to practice a difficult passage from a mass which was to be played when they returned to Prague.  There he sat and fingered and played away, sometimes so false that it fairly pierced your ears and you couldn’t hear your own voice.

Suddenly the cornetist exclaimed in his bass tones, “I have it!” and down came his fist on the map before him.  The other stopped practising for a moment, and looked at him in surprise.  “Hark ye,” said the cornetist, “there is a castle not far from Vienna, and in that castle there is a porter, and that porter is my cousin!  Dearest fellow-students, that must be our goal; we must pay our respects to my cousin, and he will arrange for our further journey.”  When I heard that, I sprang to my feet.  “Doesn’t he play on the bassoon?” I cried.  “Is he not tall and straight, with a big, prominent nose?” The cornetist nodded, upon which I embraced him so enthusiastically that his three-cornered hat fell off, and we all immediately determined to take the mail-boat on the Danube to the castle of the beautiful Countess.

When we arrived at the wharf all was ready for departure.  The fat host before whose inn the ship had lain all night was standing broad and cheery in his door-way, which he quite filled, shouting out all sorts of jokes and farewell speeches, while from every window a girl’s head was poked out nodding to the sailors, who were just carrying the last packages aboard.  An elderly gentleman with a gray overcoat and a black neckerchief, who was also going in the boat, stood on the shore talking very earnestly with a slim young fellow in leather breeches and a trig scarlet jacket, mounted on a magnificent chestnut.  To my great surprise, they seemed to glance at times toward me, and to be speaking of me.  At last the old gentleman laughed, and the slim young fellow cracked his riding-whip and galloped off through the fresh morning across the shining landscape, with the larks soaring above him.