the lions, which was humping its back ferociously on the steps of the monument just behind him. Bismarck and the other paladins, very much at home in the midst of this menagerie, stretched up their hands from the base of the pedestal in order to share in the deeds of the as yet absent ruler.
"Who ought to jump into that vacant place up there?" asked Wolfgang Buck. "The old man was merely a forerunner. Afterwards this mystic-heroic spectacle will be shut off with chains, and we shall have something to gape at—which was the main object of the whole thing. Melodrama, and no good, at that."
After a while—as twilight deepened—the father said: "And you, my son? Acting also seemed to you to be the main object."
"As it does to all my generation. We are no good for any thing else. We should not take ourselves too seriously nowadays. That is the safest attitude in view of the future, and I will not deny that it was for no other reason than vanity, that I abandoned the stage again. It is laughable, father. I left because once, when I was acting, a chief of police wept. But can you imagine that being tolerable? I represent the last degree of refinement, an insight into the heart of man, lofty morality, the intellect and soul of a modern man, to people who seem to be my equals, because they nod to me and look as if they felt something. But afterwards they pursue revolutionaries and fire on strikers, for my chief of police is typical of them all."
Here Buck turned straight towards the bush which concealed Diederich. "Art is art, and the whole tumult of the soul never touches your lives. On the day the masters of your culture understood that, as I do, they would leave you alone with your wild animals, as I do." As he pointed to the lions and eagles, the old man also looked at the monument and said:
"They have become more powerful, but their power has
