Page:The Garden of Romance - 1897.djvu/250

238 the real ones are not lost in the wash—yes, they remained with the nightcap, thrown aside and forgotten—the old thoughts, the old dreams, they were all there in the Old Bachelor's Nightcap. Never wish yourself such a one! It would make your forehead hot, cause your pulse to beat stronger, and bring you dreams that would seem to you real. And so found the first person who put it on, and that was half a century after, and it was the Burgomaster himself, as he sat quite safe indoors with his wife and eleven children; directly it was upon his head he dreamed of unhappy love, of bankruptcy, and starvation.

"Hallo! how hot the nightcap is!" he said, and pulled it off, and then there fell a pearl, and then another, that tinkled on the floor, and broke in a flash of light. "That is the rheumatism!" said the Burgomaster; "it makes my eyes swim!" But it was the tears wept half a century ago, wept by old Anthony from Eisenach.

To every one who afterwards put this cap on his head there came straightway visions and dreams. His own history grew into Anthony's, and became a whole new tale; so that there are many which others can tell, now that we have told the first one, whose last word is—Never wish for yourself a "Bachelor's Nightcap."