In the mean time Pilgrim went homewards in a dejected mood, and, passing his own door, went far out into the fields, till at last he turned, and went home. There, to his great joy, he found his friend's child. "Thus it is when friends are really attached; my good Lenz was thinking of me, at the very same moment when I was thinking of him. Perhaps he knew, or at least had a presentiment, that I meant to go to Petrowitsch, and sent the child to me to assist my petition. But it would have done no good; to such a man as Petrowitsch, men and angels would speak equally in vain."
Pilgrim was unwearied in the games he thought of to amuse the boy, and in the drawings he did for him; and then, with the aid of a white handkerchief, and his black neckcloth, he could make with his fingers hares, and hounds chasing them. Little Wilhelm shouted with joy, and made Pilgrim tell him the same story at least three times over. Pilgrim had a very pretty knack of story telling, especially about a certain chesnut brown Turk, Kulikali, with a huge nose, who could swallow smoke. Pilgrim dressed himself up in a moment as the Turk Kulikali, seated himself crosslegged on a strip of carpet on the floor, and did all sorts of conjuring tricks. Pilgrim was on this occasion quite as much a child as his young godson. Then they went down stairs, and dined with Don Bastian. In the afternoon, in spite of drizzling rain and snow showers, Pilgrim went to the riverside for an hour with Wilhelm. Was it not a pretty sight! Great blocks of ice were swimming along, and crows perched on them; they wished to see for once how they liked boating, but when one of the masses of ice was shivered, they wisely flew away, and settled on another. It was a giddy sight to look down on from above. It seemed as if the earth were moving, and the ice standing still. The boy clung timidly to Pilgrim. He took him home, and put a mattress for his godson on his old well worn sofa, for both agreed that young Lenz should not go home to-night; and it went to Pilgrim's heart when the child said, "My father speaks so loud, and my mother too; and my mother said my father was a wicked man."
"Oh! my poor Lenz, you must do what you can, to make your boy less sensitive than yourself," thought Pilgrim.