Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/170



At the end of a long journey, jolted in an old coach, in which the worms found nothing more to eat, I arrived before the only inn of the borough of G. This little locality was not without its charms, and I should have been pleased to make some stay there, had it not been for the annoyance forced upon me by a detention hurtful to my interests; for the unfortunate coach in question was so dilapidated that the curious people in G, standing at their doors, cried in my ears, in an almost unanimous voice, that two or three days would hardly suffice to put my paltry equipage in a state to proceed. Do you understand, friend reader, the pleasure of a traveller stuck in the mud? As for myself, I was on that day in a terrible humor, when I recollected suddenly, by chance, of a certain person, concerning whom one of my friends had spoken to me some years before. This person was called Aloysius Walter; he was an educated man, of excellent reputation, professor of humanities in the Jesuit College at G. I thought that to kill time, I could not do better than to pay a visit to the professor; but at the door of the college I learned that he was busy with his class in philosophy; it was necessary to come back at another time, or wait in the stranger's parlor. I waited. The gallery, in whose architecture I observed a mixed style of Roman and the reformed, did not offer to the eye the severe harmony of religious constructions. Portraits of the dignitaries of the Jesuit society,