hovel a homely cottage, dirty gutter-children changed into chaste little maidens and boys in Sunday clothes, their hair plastered with water, a poem on their lips, and the perspiring citizen in frock-coat and top-hat was moved to emotion by the consciousness of his own worth.
But not only he, Klaus Heinrich, saw the world in this light, but it saw itself too, as long as his presence lasted. A strange unreality and speciousness prevailed in places where he exercised his calling; a symmetrical, transitory window-dressing, an artificial and inspiring disguising of the reality by pasteboard and gilded wood, by garlands, lamps, draperies, and bunting, was conjured up for one fair hour, and he himself stood in the centre of the show on a carpet, which covered the bare ground, between masts painted in two colours, round which garlands twined—stood with heels together in the odour of varnish and fir-branches, and smiled with his left hand planted on hisrhip.
He laid the foundation stone of a new town hall. The citizens had, after juggling with the figures, got together the necessary sum, and a learned architect from the capital had been entrusted with the building. But Klaus Heinrich undertook the laying of the foundation stone. Amid the cheers of the population he drove up to the noble pavilion which had been built on the site, stepped lightly and collectedly out of the open carriage on to the ground, which had been rolled and sprinkled with yellow sand, and walked all alone towards the official personages in frock-coats and white ties who were waiting for him at the entrance. He asked for the architect to be presented to him, and, in full view of the public and with the officials standing with fixed smiles round him, he conducted a conversation with him for five full minutes, a conversation of weighty commonplaces about the advantages of the different styles of architecture, after which he made a decided movement, which he had meditated to himself
