But as the last sunbeam abruptly sank behind the hills, and
the twilight threw its veil over the scene, there came a hoarse deep
voice, as from a great distance:
"Hey! hey! what chattering and jingling is that up there? Hey! hey!
who catches me the ray behind the hills? Sunned enough, sung enough.
Hey! hey! through bush and grass, through grass and stream! Hey! hey!
Come dow-w-n, dow-w-w-n!"
So faded the voice away, as in murmurs of a distant thunder; but the
crystal bells broke off in sharp discords. All became mute; and
the student Anselmus observed how the three snakes, glittering and
sparkling, glided through the grass toward the river; rustling and
hustling, they rushed into the Elbe; and over the waves where they
vanished, there crackled up a green flame, which, gleaming forward
obliquely, vanished in the direction of the city.
SECOND VIGIL
How the student Anselmus was looked upon as drunk and mad. The
crossing of the Elbe. Bandmaster Graun's Bravura. Conradi's
Stomachic Liqueur, and the bronzed Apple-Woman.
"The gentleman seems not to be in his right wits!" said a respectable
burgher's wife, who, returning from a walk with her family, had paused
here, and, with crossed arms, was looking at the mad pranks of the
student Anselmus. Anselmus had clasped the trunk of the elder-tree,
and was calling incessantly up to the branches and leaves: "O glitter
and shine once more, ye dear gold snakes; let me hear your little
bell-voices once more! Look on me once more, ye kind eyes; O once, or
I must die in pain and ardent longing!" And with this, he was sighing
and sobbing from the bottom of his heart most pitifully, and, in his
eagerness and impatience, shaking the elder-tree to and fro; which,
however, instead of any reply, rustled quite gloomily and inaudibly
with its leaves, and so rather seemed, as it were, to make sport of
the student Anselmus and his sorrows.
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