Der Praefekt

we lived, you know.”
     
    The old man took the proffered glass in his shaking hands, and drank
    it eagerly.  “God bless you, Bell!” said Mr Harding; “good-bye, my old
    friend.”
     
    “And so you’re really going?” the man again asked.
     
    “Indeed I am, Bell.”
     
    The poor old bed-ridden creature still kept Mr Harding’s hand in his
    own, and the warden thought that he had met with something like warmth
    of feeling in the one of all his subjects from whom it was the least
    likely to be expected; for poor old Bell had nearly outlived all human
    Gefühle. “And your reverence,” said he, and then he paused, while
    his old palsied head shook horribly, and his shrivelled cheeks sank
    lower within his jaws, and his glazy eye gleamed with a momentary
    light; “and your reverence, shall we get the hundred a year, then?”
     
    How gently did Mr Harding try to extinguish the false hope of money
    which had been so wretchedly raised to disturb the quiet of the dying
    Mann! One other week and his mortal coil would be shuffled off; in
    one short week would God resume his soul, and set it apart for its
    irrevocable doom; seven more tedious days and nights of senseless
    inactivity, and all would be over for poor Bell in this world; and
    yet, with his last audible words, he was demanding his moneyed rights,
    and asserting himself to be the proper heir of John Hiram’s bounty!
    Not on him, poor sinner as he was, be the load of such sin!
     
    Mr Harding returned to his parlour, meditating with a sick heart
    on what he had seen, and Bunce with him.  We will not describe the
    parting of these two good men, for good men they were. Es war in
    vain that the late warden endeavoured to comfort the heart of the old
    bedesman; poor old Bunce felt that his days of comfort were gone. Die
    hospital had to him been a happy home, but it could be so no longer.
    He had had honour there, and friendship; he had recognised his master,
    and been recognised; all his wants, both of soul and body, had been
    supplied, and he had been a happy man.  He wept grievously as he
    parted from his friend, and the tears of an old man are bitter.
    “It is all over for me in this world,” said he, as he gave the last
    squeeze to Mr Harding’s hand; “I have now to forgive those who have
    injured me;—and to die.”
     
    And so the old man went out, and then Mr Harding gave way to his grief
    and he too wept aloud.
     
     
     
     
    Chapter XXI
     
    FAZIT
     
    Our tale is now done, and it only remains to us to collect the
    scattered threads of our little story, and to tie them into a seemly
    Knoten. This will not be a work of labour, either to the author or
    to his readers; we have not to deal with many personages, or with
    stirring events, and were it not for the custom of the thing, we might
    leave it to the imagination of all concerned to conceive how affairs
    at Barchester arranged themselves.
     
    On the morning after the day last alluded to, Mr Harding, at an early
    hour, walked out of the hospital, with his daughter under his arm, and
    sat down quietly to breakfast at his lodgings over the chemist’s shop.
    There was no parade about his departure; no one, not even Bunce, was
    there to witness it; had he walked to the apothecary’s thus early to
    get a piece of court plaster, or a box of lozenges, he could not have
    done it with less appearance of an important movement. Es gab eine
    tear in Eleanor’s eye as she passed through the big gateway and over
    the bridge; but Mr Harding walked with an elastic step, and entered
    his new abode with a pleasant face.
     
    “Now, my dear,” said he, “you have everything ready, and you can
    make tea here just as nicely as in the parlour at the hospital.”  So
    Eleanor took off her bonnet and made the tea.  After this manner did
    the late Warden of Barchester Hospital accomplish his flitting, and
    change his residence.
     
    It was not long before the archdeacon brought his father to discuss
    the subject of a new warden.  Of course he looked upon the nomination
    as his own, and he had in his eye three or four fitting candidates,
    seeing that Mr Cummins’s plan as to the living of Puddingdale could
    not be brought to bear.  How can I describe the astonishment which
    confounded him, when his father declared that he would appoint no
    successor to Mr Harding?  “If we can get the matter set to rights, Mr
    Harding will return,” said the bishop; “and if we cannot, it will be
    wrong to