I found my brother in his dressing-gown, and he employed the five minutes of our interview very completely, according to his habit, in emptying a woolsack full of vexatious news about Kniephof before me:  disorderly inspectors, a lot of damaged sheep, distillers drunk every day, thoroughbred colts (the prettiest, of course) come to grief, and rotten potatoes, fell in a rolling torrent from his obligingly opened mouth upon my somewhat travel-worn self.  On my brother’s account I must affect and utter some exclamations of terror and complaint, for my indifferent manner on receiving news of misfortune vexes him, and as long as I do not express surprise he has ever new and still worse news in stock.  This time he attained his object, at least in my inner man, and when I took my seat next to the Jewish elbow in green fur I was in a right bad humor; especially the colt distressed me—­an animal as pretty as a picture and three years old.

Not before getting out of doors did I become conscious of the ingratitude of my heart, and the thought of the unmerited happiness that had become mine a fortnight earlier again won the mastery in me.  In Stettin I found drinking, gambling friends.  William Ramin took occasion to say, apropos of a remark about reading the Bible, “Tut!  In Reinfeld I’d speak like that, too, if I were in your place, but to believe you can impose on your oldest acquaintances is amusing.”  I found my sister very well and full of joy about you and me.  She wrote to you, I think, before she received your letter.  Arnim is full of anxiety lest I become “pious.”  He kept looking at me all the time earnestly and thoughtfully, with sympathetic concern, as one looks at a dear friend whom one would like to save and yet almost gives up for lost.  I have seldom seen him so tender.  Very clever people have a curious manner of viewing the world.  In the evening (I hope you did not write so late) I drank your health in the foaming grape-juice of Sillery, in company with half a dozen Silesian counts, Schaffgotsch and others, at the Hotel de Rome, and convinced myself Friday morning that the ice on the Elbe was still strong enough to bear my horse’s weight, and that, so far as the freshet was concerned, I might today be still at your blue or black side[4] if other current official engagements had not also claimed my presence.  Snow has fallen very industriously all day long, and the country is white once more, without severe cold.  When I arrived it was all free from snow on this side of Brandenburg; the air was warm and the people were ploughing; it was as though I had traveled out of winter into opening spring, and yet within me the short springtime had changed to winter, for the nearer I came to Schoenhausen the more oppressive I found the thought of entering upon the old loneliness once more, for who knows how long.  Pictures of a wasted past arose in me as though they would banish me from you.  I was on the verge of tears, as when, after a school vacation, I caught sight of Berlin’s towers from the train.