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Updated: June 9, 2025
"I can assure you it is astonishing, and most delicious, the way in which the Devil and the gruesomest witch-trials adapt themselves to the mental bent and style of the author of 'Nutcracker and the King of Mice. Just let me tell you, dear Ottmar, how I chanced to lay my hands upon an experimental essay on this subject of our doughty Lothair's.
"I don't see," said Ottmar, "why we should not talk about the weather; the only reason you can object to it is that talking about it seems to be an observance of a kind of rather slovenly old custom, which has resulted from a necessity to say something or other when there happens to be nothing else in people's minds to talk about.
Sit still on your chair, Ottmar; don't drum the Russian Grenadiers' March on the elbow of your seat, Vincenz. I really think that the author of the 'Soehne des Thales' deserves to be discussed rationally and quietly by us, and I must confess that my heart is very full of this subject, and I cannot help letting the froth which is seething there boil thoroughly over."
"What an unfortunate idea it was," Lothair cried out, in the gloomiest ill-humour, when Ottmar came in and found him sitting with Theodore "what an unfortunate idea it was of ours to insist on binding ourselves together again so closely, jumping over all the clefts which time had split between us!
"Don't forget, though, Theodore, my friend," said Ottmar, "that there are quantities of people who won't go up the ladder at all, because it isn't 'proper' or 'becoming. And many turn giddy by the time they get to the third rung of it. Many never see the ladder at all, though it is facing them in the broad, daily path of their lives, and they pass by it every day.
"And," said Lothair, "if he insists on being a spirit, he must, at all events, not be an unquiet spirit, but sit down and drink tea, without making too much clattering with his cup, and listen to Ottmar, as to whose tale I am all the more curious, that this time it is a working up of a thema given to him by another."
"Chance," began Ottmar, "or rather, a kindly-intentioned introduction, brought me into the aesthetic tea society which I mentioned; and there were circumstances which induced me, or rendered it incumbent on me, to attend its meetings regularly for a time, although heaven knows they were tedious and wearisome enough.
Its early history is shrouded in obscurity one of its towers has been attributed to the Romans; it can still show undoubted works of the ninth century in the chapels of Sts. Ottmar and Margaret, from which time it received alterations and additions of all kinds, ending in leaving it the picturesque assemblage of quaint old buildings which it at present remains.
In the fullness of my annoyance I ran out here into the open; and chance so willed it that, as I was returning to the town, I struck into the walk which leads past this summer-house. Then I seemed to hear a well-known voice; I peeped in at the window, and saw my worthy Serapion Brethren, and heard Ottmar reading 'The Uncanny Guest." "What," interrupted Ottmar, "you know my tale?"
"I don't think I could have a better opportunity for reading you a tale which I wrote a long while ago, and which happens to begin with tea-drinking. I mention, to begin with, that it is in Cyprian's style." Ottmar read A storm was raging through the heavens, announcing the coming of winter, whirling black clouds on its wings, which dashed down hissing, rattling squall-showers of rain and hail.
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