Transcriber's Note:
1. Page source:http://books.google.com/books?id=TWcqAAAAYAAJ&dq
2. This volume include four short-stories: Iolanthe's Wedding; TheWoman Who Was His Friend; The New Year's Eve Confession; and TheGooseherd.
I tell you,gentlemen, it's a rotten piece of business to be standingbeside an old friend's open grave-simply disgusting.
You stand with your feet planted in the upturned earth, and twirl yourmoustache and look stupid, while you feel like crying the soul out ofyour body.
He was dead--there was no use wishing he weren't.
In him was lost the greatest genius for concocting and mixing punches,cocktails, grogs, cobblers--every sort of drink. I tell you, gentlemen,when you went walking in the country with him and he began to draw theair in through his nose in his peculiar fashion, you might be sure hehad just conceived a new idea for a punch. From the mere smell of aweed he knew the sorts of wine that had to be poured over it to bringinto being a something extra fine, a something that had never beforeexisted.
All in all he was a good fellow, and in the many years we sat oppositeeach other, evening after evening, when he came to me at Ilgenstein, orI rode over to him at Döbeln, the time never dragged.
If only it hadn't been for his eternal marriage schemes. That was hisweak side. I mean as far as I was concerned. As for himself--"GoodLord," he'd say, "I'm just waiting for that vile water to creep up tomy heart, then I'll slide off into the next world."
And now it had come to that. He had slid off. He lay there in his blackcoffin, and I felt like tapping on the lid and saying:
"Pütz, don't play this dirty trick on me. Come out. Why, what's goingto become of our piquet to-day?"
Nothing to laugh at, gentlemen. Habit is the most violent of allpassions, and the number of persons that are ruined every year byhaving their habits interfered with are never sung in song or epic, toquote my old friend Uhland.
Such weather! I wouldn't send a dog out in such weather.