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Old men like young women, but so do old women hanker after young men. The life companion of Moehrlein embraced Hilsenhoff’s knees. With smirkings and grimacings and leers that started his shudders afresh, she told him all. She confessed her crime and abased herself, but now they would begin life again, and she croaked forth a string of allurements from a throat that had known too many rich puddings. Oh, who shall describe her transports! Never before had every fiber of her being been so penetrated with joy! A young husband, oh, a young husband! By as much as Moehrlein had once surpassed him, did Hilsenhoff now surpass Moehrlein a hundred fold. And young, young, young! She was like to fall on her face in her ecstasy. The discarded and despised Moehrlein stood by and paid, if never before, the price of his villainy. There is a contempt of man for man and a contempt of woman for woman, but the contempt of woman for man—-

One sleeps and is unconscious, but nonetheless by some subtle sense is aware of the passage of time, and the thirty years that he had slept, pressed upon young Hilsenhoff and his soul yearned to take up life again. He looked at the companions of his youth, that youth which was still his and had gone from them, and he looked at the place where he had lain for a third of a century, thick with damp green mould. Outside the song of birds was calling him, the rustle of green leaves and the glorious sunlight, the world renewing its life with the warm throbs of the year’s youth, and putting from him forever his living grave and the woman and her paramour, he rushed into the joyous springtide.

Now why, my friend, descend into the hell of repinings and rage and heart-gnawings of that woman he left behind? Or why tell of the misery of the learned Dr. Moehrlein? She has no comfort whatsoever, but the doctor has the solace of his kommers, so let us wish that his beer may be forever flat, his wieners mildewy, and the mustard mouldy like the horrible nest of young Hilsenhoff.