One evening a black bier was seen before the house with the green shutters.  At a distance stood groups of women and children, now whispering softly to one another, now peering eagerly in one direction with a curiosity that at times became impatient.  Here and there a long black coat and a three-cornered hat came down the street in solemn gloom and vanished behind the bier into the house.  At last the door opened.  The coffin stood on the bier, the pall covered both; gently, in rhythmical motion, there appeared a black moving mass; now they were in their places; the pall-bearers adjusted their hats.  The procession moved, rippling, wavering.  On top gleamed bright the hammer which Valentine had polished, and told that what they were now surrendering to earth had worked honestly between heaven and earth.  The sweet tears of the old women washed away whatever stains clung to his memory.  Inwardly they made a vow that none who belonged to them should ever become a slater.  The slater’s calling is a dangerous one, between heaven and earth; the man who lay beneath the black pall, between the boards, silent as he was, preached that with poignant eloquence.  They turned their eyes toward the old gentleman who was led by two mourners.  He seemed to embody the very spirit of honest burial.  But when their gaze fell upon Apollonius they forgot the mildness with which they had just judged; they unburied the dead man from the cool funeral flowers that covered his human nakedness.  The hammer lying above him would have been covered with the dark rust of shame had it not been for Apollonius.  Then they looked at the young wife, and, according to the way of their sex, the mourners became match-makers.  And indeed they had right on their side; a bonnier couple or one better suited could scarce have been found in the whole town.  The procession passed by the Red Eagle, where a ball was in progress at which Fritz Nettenmair was missing—­surely a dull affair!  The procession went the same way that Fritz Nettenmair had gone after he had talked with the workman.  He had then seen in spirit his brother lying beneath the black fluttering pall and himself following as a mourner.  The procession went on, still keeping to the streets that Fritz Nettenmair had trodden on that occasion.  Outside the town-gate the willows melted again into mist or the mist into willows.  Here and there mist-men carried mist-coffins near the real one.  At the cross-ways, where Fritz Nettenmair had seen the journeyman disappear in the mist, he himself disappeared.  In Tambach they were bearing the journeyman to burial.  The two must have had much to say to each other.  Fritz Nettenmair could have told the workman how carefully he had carried out the thought sown by him, even to the cutting of the rope; and the workman could have told his former master how he became a victim to the cuts thus made.  The pastor who preached the sermon over Fritz Nettenmair’s grave, who was buried with all the honors due to his standing or to be bought with money, did not know what an awe-inspiring theme had eluded him.