Page:Stories by Foreign Authors (German I).djvu/132

124 and swallowed submissively the family remedies which she brought to me.

At last the fair was over, and the Egyptian fire-eater had left the town. But the poor fellow did not go far. In the city where he exhibited his skill he was recognized and arrested, because;he had avoided service in the army. To be sure, he was set free again after a few weeks as unqualified; but in the meantime his employer with the performing hares had gone nobody knew where, and Lipp was left solely dependent on his art, which he practised for some time in the neighboring towns and villages.

The end of his artistic career is sad and melancholy. He fell a victim to his calling. As an ambitious man he enlarged his artistic capabilities; he ate not only pitch but also pieces of broken glass, and an indigestible lamp-chimney was the cause of his destruction.

When I returned to the city I burned my tragedy of "Pharaoh," and sold my cloak and Calabrian hat to an old-clothes dealer. I was thoroughly disgusted with the career of an artist, and whenever afterwards I was inclined to relapse, Frau Eberlein would call out to me, "Do you, too, want to die from a lamp-chimney?"

Then I would bend my head and bury my nose in my Greek grammar.