'GOD'S PEACE' 295
gave so often, that very soon there will be no more to give.
I will answer my angry mistress thus : ' I wish for you, who were so apt a pupil, that once in your life you may meet a man who will teach you to love.'
Perhaps I will in that way, at all events, teach her to hate.
For she is not stupid.
LAST DAYS OF JUNE.
I WILL write a book about the old town. Not VIII as it is, for I don't care about the critical psychological method of modern hterature, which is, of course, at my disposal, nor do I wish to write about the town as it was, but I should like to rebuild it as I see it through the blue haze of childhood's memory, in a sun-mist of peaceful joy and sadness without bitterness. It shall be a book for all those, who, like myself, are longing for a cosy and quiet corner from which the world is barred out, and where the soul, for a short while, can live its flower life in a convent-garden. It will be a book without novelty, without glaring colour- ing ; there will be no excitement and scarcely any action in it. My wish will be fulfilled, if those who read it have the feeling that I have brought them a bunch of single-coloured, single-scented wild flowers into their room.
Three times a week the town library is opened. I spend these in the reading-room looking through yellow folios, where in twisted, pedantic writing
