“I can’t stand by any longer and see you growing thinner and paler all the time,” said his brother one evening, after he had reported how unsuccessfully he had spoken for him again that day.  “You must go away from here for a while; that will have good results for you in two ways.  When I tell her that it is on her account that you have gone out into the world, perhaps she will turn.  Believe me, I know the long-haired tribe, and I know how to treat them.  You must write her a touching letter for good-by; I will deliver it, and I’ll manage to soften her heart.  And if it can’t be accomplished, it will do you good to be away from here where everything reminds you of her, for a year—­or several years.  And finally, strange places will make another man of you, who will know better how to get round the apron-wearers.  You must learn to dance; that’s already half the battle.  And anyway, the old Blue-coat has been asked by his cousin in Cologne to send one of us to him; I read it the other day in a letter that had fallen out of his pocket.  Just tell him that you have gathered something of the sort from several things he has said lately and that you are ready to go if he wants you to.  Or let me do that.  You are too honest.”

And he really did arrange it.  It is a question whether our hero would have been able voluntarily to make up his mind to leave home.  He could not understand how any one could live anywhere else but in his home town; to him it had always seemed like a fairy tale that there were other towns and people living in them.  He had not imagined the life and doings of these people as real, like those of the inhabitants of his home, but as a kind of shadow-play that existed only for the looker-on, not for the shadows themselves.  His brother, who knew how to treat the old man, led the conversation up to the cousin in Cologne as if by chance, and was clever enough to interpret the suggestions that Herr Nettenmair made in his diplomatic way as preliminary hints and connect them with others that referred to our hero.  After frequent conversations he seemed to take it as the express desire of the old man that Apollonius should go to his cousin in Cologne.  This put the idea into the old man’s mind and, as it passed for his own, he brooded over it in his own way.  There was little work to do at the time, and there seemed to be no prospect of its increasing materially for some time.  A pair of hands could be spared; if they remained in the business all the workers would be condemned to semi-idleness.  The old man could stand nothing as little as what he called dawdling.  The only thing that was lacking was that our hero should resist.  He knew nothing of his brother’s plans.  The latter had wisely not initiated him into them, because he knew him too well to expect his support in a matter that he would have rejected as both underhand and disrespectful to his father.

“You want to send Apollonius to Cologne,” said his brother to the old man one afternoon; “but will he want to go?  I don’t think so.  You will have to send me out on my travels.  Apollonius won’t go—­at least not today, nor tomorrow.”