This was Obenreizer.
An oddly pastoral kind of office it was, and one that would never have
answered in England. It stood in a neat back yard, fenced off from a
pretty flower-garden. Goats browsed in the doorway, and a cow was within
half-a-dozen feet of keeping company with the clerk. Maitre Voigt's room
was a bright and varnished little room, with panelled walls, like a toy-
chamber. According to the seasons of the year, roses, sunflowers,
hollyhocks, peeped in at the windows. Maitre Voigt's bees hummed through
the office all the summer, in at this window and out at that, taking it
frequently in their day's work, as if honey were to be made from Maitre
Voigt's sweet disposition. A large musical box on the chimney-piece
often trilled away at the Overture to Fra Diavolo, or a Selection from
William Tell, with a chirruping liveliness that had to be stopped by
force on the entrance of a client, and irrepressibly broke out again the
moment his back was turned.
"Courage, courage, my good fellow!" said Maitre Voigt, patting Obenreizer
on the knee, in a fatherly and comforting way. "You will begin a new
life to-morrow morning in my office here."
Obenreizer--dressed in mourning, and subdued in manner--lifted his hand,
with a white handkerchief in it, to the region of his heart. "The
gratitude is here," he said. "But the words to express it are not here."
"Ta-ta-ta! Don't talk to me about gratitude!" said Maitre Voigt.
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