I entered the garden, all the tremor of expectation in my bosom.  I seemed to hear laughter near me.  I shuddered, threw a rapid glance round me, but could discover nobody.  I advanced farther.  I seemed to perceive a sound as of man’s steps near me, but there was nothing to be seen.  I believed myself deceived by my ear.  It was yet early, no one in Count Peter’s arbor, the garden still empty.  I traversed the well-known paths.  I penetrated to the very front of the dwelling.  The same noise more distinctly followed me.  I seated myself with an agonized heart on a bench which stood in the sunny space before the house-door.  It seemed as if I had heard the unseen kobold, laughing in mockery, seat himself near me.  The key turned in the door, it opened, and the Forest-master issued forth with papers in his hand.  A mist seemed to envelop my head.  I looked up, and—­horror! the man in the gray coat sat by me, gazing on me with a satanic leer.  He had drawn his magic-cap at once over his head and mine; at his feet lay his and my shadow peaceably by each other.  He played negligently with the well-known parchment which he held in his hand, and as the Forest-master, busied with his documents, went to and fro in the shadow of the arbor, he stooped familiarly to my ear and whispered in it these words—­“So then you have, notwithstanding, accepted my invitation, and here sit we for once, two heads under one cap.  All right! all right!  But now give me my bird’s nest again; you have no further need of it, and are too honest a man to wish to withhold it from me; but there needs no thanks; I assure you that I have lent it you with the most hearty good will.”  He took it unceremoniously out of my hand, put it in his pocket, and laughed at me again, and that so loud that the Forest-master himself looked round at the noise.  I sat there as if changed to stone.

“But you must admit,” continued he, “that such a cap is much more convenient.  It covers not only your person but your shadow at the same time, and as many others as you have a mind to take with you.  See you again today.  I conduct two of them”—­he laughed again.  “Mark this, Schlemihl; what we at first won’t do with a good will, that will we in the end be compelled to.  I still fancy you will buy that thing from me, take back the bride (for it is yet time), and we leave Rascal dangling on the gallows, an easy thing for us so long as rope is to be had.  Hear you—­I will give you also my cap into the bargain.”

The mother came forth, and the conversation began.  “How goes it with Mina?”

“She weeps.”

“Silly child! it cannot be altered!”

“Certainly not; but to give her to another so soon?  Oh, man! thou art cruel to thy own child.”

“No, mother, that thou quite mistakest.  When she, even before she has wept out her childish tears, finds herself the wife of a very rich and honorable man, she will awake comforted out of her trouble as out of a dream, and thank God and us—­that shalt thou see!”