We shall make things better, certainly.
Poverty and public calamities and war, we shall change all that, we shall set those things to rights, er, hem! But let us alone, above all, and don't concern yourselves with it--you would spoil everything, my children.

_We_ shall do all that, but not immediately." "Quite so, quite so," we say in chorus.
"Can we be happy all at once," the old man goes on; "change misery into joy, and poverty into riches?
Come now, it's not possible, and I'll tell you why; if it had been as easy as all that, it would have been done already, wouldn't it ?" The bells begin to ring.

The four strokes of the hour are just falling from the steeple which the rising mists touch already, though the evening makes use of it last of all; and just then one would say that the church is beginning to talk even while it is singing.
The important people get onto their horses or into their carriages and go away--a cavalcade where uniforms gleam and gold glitters.

We can see the procession of the potentates of the day outlined on the crest of the hill which is full of our dead.

They climb and disappear, one by one.