In the immediate neighborhood of Aurach, after we had climbed the Hongar and then, beginning the descent, had walked along the ridge towards the Höllengebirge for five hours, we visited Haumer, the logger, of whom we had heard nothing for a long time. Haumer did not open his door to us even after we had knocked repeatedly, although we were sure our assumption that he was at home was correct. When we had already left his house, we suddenly had the impression he had now heard us and wanted to open up for us, and we went back to his house. Haumer—whom we had known from our earliest childhood and who had been closer to us than anyone—did, in fact, open the door and invited us to sit down in the so-called downstairs parlor. It was only after we had been sitting on the benches in the downstairs parlor for a while that we realized that Haumer had still not said a word to us. We stayed more than an hour with him and then we took our leave without his having uttered a single word. It was not until the next day, while talking to my cousin about the meeting, that I learned that Haumer had lost his hearing and his speech more than four years before as the result of a gun salute that he himself had fired on his daughter’s wedding-day when she married a butcher’s apprentice from Nussdorf. At the same time it became clear to me that it was over four years since I had visited Haumer, the very person, I thought, to whom I owe so much.

In Earnest

IN EARNEST

A comic actor who had for decades earned his living by being funny and who had always filled every hall in which he appeared to the very last seat suddenly became the long-expected sensation for a group of Bavarian excursionists who had come across him on the rocky ledge above the so-called Salzburg horse-pond. The actor stated, in front of the group of excursionists, that just as he was, in his lederhosen and with his Tyrolean hat on his head, he would throw himself off the ledge, at which the group of excursionists had as usual burst into loud laughter. But the actor is reported to have said that he was in earnest and to have immediately thrown himself off.

Too Much

TOO MUCH

A paterfamilias who had for decades been praised and beloved for a so-called extraordinary sense of family and who one Saturday afternoon, admittedly in especially humid weather, murdered four of his six children, defended himself in court by saying that all of a sudden the children were too much for him.

Prescription

PRESCRIPTION