The next day.  Friedrich plunged into the bookseller’s shop.

“Well, now, what is it?” smiled the comfortable little bookseller.

“I want some paper, please,” gasped Friedrich; “a good big bit if I may have it, and, if you please, I must go now.  I will come and clean out the shop for you at the end of the week, but I am very busy to-day.”

“The condition of the shop,” said the little bookseller, grandiloquently, with a wave of his hand, “yields to more important matters; namely, to thy condition, my child, which is not of the best.  Thou art as white as this sheet of paper, to which thou art heartily welcome.  I am silent, but not ignorant.  Thou wouldst be a writer, but art not yet a philosopher, my Friedrich.  Thou art not fast-set on thy philosophic equilibrium.  Thou hast knocked down three books and a stool since thou hast come in the shop.  Be calm, my child:  consider that even if truly also the fast-bound-eternally-immutable-condition of everlastingly-varying-circumstance—­”

But by this time Friedrich was at home.

How he got through the next three days he never knew.  He stumbled in and out of the house with the awkwardness of an idiot, and was so stupid in school that nothing but his previous good character saved him from a flogging.  The day before the Feast of St. Nicholas (which was a holiday) the schoolmaster dismissed him with the severe inquiry, if he meant to be a dunce all his life? and Friedrich went home with two sentences ringing in his head—­

“Do I mean to be a dunce all my life?”

“Friedrich can do nothing useful.”

To-night the ballad must be finished.

He contrived to sit up beyond his usual hour, and escaped notice by crouching behind a large linen chest, and there wrote and wrote till his heart beat and his head felt as if it would split in pieces.  At last, the careful mother discovered that Friedrich had not bid her good-night, and he was brought out of his hiding-place and sent to bed.

He took a light and went softly up the ladder into the loft, and, to his great satisfaction, found the others asleep.  He said his prayers, and got into bed, but he did not put out the light; he put a box behind it to prevent its being seen, and drew out his paper and wrote.  The ballad was done, but he must make a fair copy for the Maerchen-Frau; and very hard work it was, in his feverish excited state, to write out a thing that was finished.  He worked resolutely, however, and at last completed it with trembling hands, and pushed it under his pillow.

Then he sat up in bed, and looked round him.

Time passed, and still he sat shivering and clasping his knees, and the reason he sat so was—­because he dared not lie down.