* * *

Splendid weather! It's such a beautiful, warm day; afterward I must lie down a bit in the sun. (He spreads out his bag.) Well, fortune, stand by me. Of course, when I think that this capricious goddess of fortune so seldom favors shrewdly laid plans, that she always ends up by disgracing the intelligence of mortals, I feel as though I should lose all my courage. Yet, be quiet, my heart; a kingdom is certainly worth the trouble of working and sweating some for it! If only there are no dogs around here; I can't bear those creatures at all; it is a race that I despise because they so willingly submit to the lowest servitude to human beings. They can't do anything but either fawn or bite; they haven't fashionable manners at all, a thing which is so necessary in company. There's no game to be caught. (He begins to sing a hunting song: "I steal through the woods so still and wild," etc. A nightingale in the bush near-by begins to sing.) She sings gloriously, the songstress of the grove; but how delicious she must taste! The great people of the earth are, after all, right lucky in the fact that they can eat as many nightingales and larks as they like; we poor common people must content ourselves with their singing, with the beauty in nature, with the incomprehensibly sweet harmony. It's a shame I can't hear anything sing without getting a desire to eat it. Nature! Nature! Why do you always destroy my finest emotions by having created me thus! I feel almost like taking off my boots and softly climbing up that tree yonder; she must be perching there. (Stamping in the pit.) The nightingale is good-natured not to let herself be interrupted even by this martial music; she must taste delicious; I am forgetting all about my hunting with these sweet dreams. Truly, there's no game to be caught. Why, who's there?

BÖTTICH.

I still keep on admiring the acting of the cat. In such details one recognizes the great and experienced actor; for example, as often as he took the rabbit out of the sack, he always lifted it by the ears; that was not prescribed for him; I wonder whether you noticed how the king grasped it at once by the body? But these animals are held by the ears because that is where they can best bear it. That's what I call a master!

* * *

Oh, when you love art as I do it is a pleasant task! Just now a very acute thought also occurred to me concerning the cat's boots, and in them I admire the genius of the actor. You see, at first be is a cat; for that reason he must lay aside his natural clothing in order to assume the appropriate disguise of a cat. Then he has to appear fully as a hunter; that is what I conclude, for every one calls him that, nor does a soul marvel at him; an unskilful actor would have dressed himself exactly so too, but what would have happened to our illusion? We might perhaps have forgotten that he was still originally a cat and how uncomfortable a new costume would be for the actor over the fur he already had. By means of the boots, however, he merely skilfully suggests the hunter's costume; and that such suggestions are extremely dramatic, the ancients prove to us very excellently, in often—

HOST.

How the world has changed! If you read in old books or listen to old people's stories, they always got louis d'ors or something like that if they spoke to a king or a prince. Such a king would formerly never dare to open his mouth if he did not press gold pieces into your hand at once. But now! How, pray, is one to make one's fortune unexpectedly, if the chance is over even with kings? Innocent peasant! I wish to God I didn't owe anything—that comes of the new sentimental descriptions of country life. Such a king is powerful and envies people of our station. I must only thank God that he did not hang me. The strange hunter was our Bugbear himself after all. At least it will now appear in the paper, I suppose, that the king has spoken to me graciously.