BOHN’S STANDARD LIBRARY.

RICHTER’S

FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES.

GEORGE BELL & SONS

LONDON: YORK ST., COVENT GARDEN
NEW YORK 66 FIFTH AVENUE, AND
BOMBAY: 53 ESPLANADE ROAD
CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON BELL & CO.

FLOWER, FRUIT AND THORN PIECES;

OR, THE

WEDDED LIFE, DEATH, AND MARRIAGE

OF

FIRMIAN STANISLAUS SIEBENKÆS,

PARISH ADVOCATE

IN THE BURGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.

(A GENUINE THORN PIECE.)

BY

JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.

Translated from the German

BY

ALEXANDER EWING.

LONDON

GEORGE BELL AND SONS

1897

[Reprinted from Stereotype plates.]

PREFACE

TO THE

SECOND EDITION.

What advantage shall I reap in giving to the world this, my new edition of ‘Siebenkæs,’ embellished and perfected as it is with all the additions, corrections, and improvements which it has been in my power to make? Can I expect to be any the better for it? People will, I daresay, buy it and read it; but not give much of their time to the study of it, nor be sufficiently detailed and thorough in their criticism of it. The Pythia of Criticism has hitherto been chary of her oracles to me, as the Greek Pythia was to other inquirers; she has chewed up my laurels, instead of crowning me with them, and prophesied little or nothing. The author very distinctly remembers setting to work, for instance, at the second edition of his ‘Hesperus,’[^[1]] with his pruning-saw in his left hand and his oculist’s knife in his right, and applying both instruments to the work to an extraordinary extent; it was in vain, however, that he looked for anything like an appreciative notice of it, either in literary or non-literary publications. Similarly, in all his new editions (those of ‘Fixlein,’ the ‘Preparatory School,’ and ‘Levana,’ are proofs and witnesses[^[2]]), however he may set to work, hanging up new pictures, turning some of the old ones’ faces to the wall—marching off some ideas, relieving them by others—making characters conduct themselves better, or worse, or hit upon better, or upon worse, ideas, as the case may be,—the deuce a reviewer takes the least notice of it, or says a word to the world on the subject. But in this way I learn little, am not told where I have done pretty well, or the reverse, and am minus, perhaps, some little bit of praise and encouragement which I may deserve.

This is how the question stands, and several consequences follow as matters of course; the indifferent class of readers consider the author incapable of making any critical emendations, while the enthusiastic class think none are necessary—their common point of agreement being the supposition that he absorbs and emits the whole thing with the same natural, matter of course, ease and absence of effort as the Aphides, the plant-lice, do the honey-dew, which is in such request with the bees, though, unlike the said bees, he is not very clever at making the wax for it.

Then there are a good many who think every line should be left in the condition in which it first flowed, or burst, spontaneously from its author’s fancy—just as if corrections were not themselves spontaneous outbursts as well as the other. Other readers prefer to belong to none of the above factions and consequently belong, to some extent, to all. Were it my object to express myself briefly, I should merely have to do so as follows:—firstly, they say, it would be much better if he simply spoke artlessly out whatever he finds it in his heart to say! and (if this is just what one happens to have done), secondly, how much better would be the effect of that which he finds it in that heart of his to say, and how much it would be improved, were it to be done according to the canons of taste and criticism! I can express these ideas likewise in a more roundabout form, as follows:—If a writer curbs himself too closely, if he thinks less about the strong throb of his heart than about the delicate arterial network and plexus of taste, and breaks up its broad stream into fine, minute, dew-drops of the invisible perspiration of criticism—then they say—“the fact is, that the thicker and more powerful a jet of water is, the higher it shoots, penetrating the atmosphere, and overcoming its resistance; whilst a more delicate jet is dissipated before it gets half as far.” But, when the author does just the reverse of the above; when he presses out all his overflowing heart in one gush, and lets the blood-billows flow when and how they will, then the critics point the following moral—doing it, however, in a metaphor other than I should have expected of them—“A work of art is like a paper kite, which rises the higher the more the boy pulls and holds back the string, but falls the moment he lets it go.”

We return at last to our book. The most important of the emendations made upon it are, perhaps, the historical; for, since the first edition appeared, I have had the good fortune—partly because I have had an opportunity of visiting and seeing Kuhschnappel itself, the scene of the story (as was some time since stated in Jean Paul’s letters), partly from my correspondence with the hero of it himself—of becoming acquainted with family circumstances and occurrences which, probably, I could not have got at in any other way, unless I had sat down and coolly invented them. I have even made prize of some fresh Leibgeberiana, which I am happy to be able now to communicate to the public.

The new edition is also improved by the banishment of all those foreigners of words which occupied places more appropriately to be filled by natives of the country; also by a critical cleansing away of all the genitive final s’s of compound words. But really the labour of sweeping and striking out letters and words all through four long volumes can be estimated so highly by nobody, not even by Posterity, as by the sweeper and striker-out himself.

Another of the improvements made in the Second Edition is, that I have placed both the “Flower-pieces” at the end of the second volume[^[3]] (for in the former edition they came both at the beginning of the first), and that it is no longer the first volume, but, much more appropriately, the second, which closes with the first Fruit-piece.

And lastly, it may, perhaps, be reckoned as one of the minor improvements, that in the two Flower-pieces—particularly in that of the Dead Christ—I have not made any improvements, but left everything as it was, and not attempted to scrape away any of the golden writing-sand with which I had made the letters a little rough and illegible.

The above are the principal alterations, concerning which I should be so glad to be favoured with the opinions of able reviewers, to the increasing of my information, perhaps also of my reputation. But, as there could not be a more troublesome business than the comparing of the old book with the improved one, page by page, as it were, I have deposited in the school-book shop the printed copy of the old edition, in which all the writing-ink emendations of the printing-ink, that is to say, all the places which have been written or stroked through, can be easily seen at a glance, often half and whole pages done to death, so that it would really astonish you. Critics not on the spot must, indeed, content themselves with laying the volumes of each of the editions into the opposite scales of a grocer’s balance, and then looking, when they will see how much the new edition outweighs the old. From my strict and anxious treatment of my Second Edition, then, all critics may form an idea of my strict and anxious treatment of my first; they may also form an idea how much I struck out of my manuscript before printing, when they observe how much I have struck out after printing.

Dr. Jean Paul Fr. Richter.

Bayreuth, September, 1817.

CONTENTS.

[PREFACE to the Second Edition]

[PREFACE], with which I was obliged to put Jacob Oehrmann, General Dealer, to sleep, because I wished to narrate the “Dog Post Days,” and these present “Flower-Pieces,” &c., &c., to his Daughter

[Wedded Life, Death, And Marriage of F. S. Siebenkæs.]

[A Genuine Thorn Piece.]

[BOOK I.]

[CHAPTER I.]

A Wedding Day, succeeding a day of respite—The Counterparts—Dish Quintette in two Courses—Table-talk—Six Arms and Hands.

[CHAPTER II.]

Home Fun—Sundry formal Calls—The Newspaper Article—A Love Quarrel, and a few hard words—Antipathetic ink on the wall—Friendship of the Satirists—Government of Kuhschnappel.

[Appendix to Chapter II.]

Government of the Imperial Market Borough of Kuhschnappel.

[CHAPTER III.]

Lenette’s Honeymoon—Book Brewing—Schulrath Stiefel—Mr. Everard—A Day before the Fair—The Red Cow—St. Michael’s Fair—The Beggars’ Opera—Diabolical Temptation in the Wilderness, or the Mannikin of Fashion—Autumn Joys—A New Labyrinth.

[CHAPTER IV.]

A Matrimonial Partie à la Guerre—Letter to that Hair Collector, the Venner—Self-deceptions—Adam’s Marriage Sermon—Shadowing and Over-shadowing.

[End of the Preface and of the First Book.]

[PREFACE to the Second, Third and Fourth Books.]

[PREFACE by the Author of ‘Hesperus’.]

[BOOK II.]

[CHAPTER V.]

The Broom and the Besom as Passion Implements—The Importance of a Bookwriter—Diplomatic Negotiations and Discussions on the subject of Candle Snuffing—The Pewter Cupboard—Domestic Hardships and Enjoyments.

[CHAPTER VI.]

Matrimonial Jars—Extra Leaflet on the Loquacity of Women—More Pledging—The Mortar and the Snuff-mill—A Scholar’s Kiss—On the Consolations of Humanity.

[Continuation and Conclusion Of Chapter VI.]

The Checked Calico Dress—More Pledges—Christian Neglect of the Study of Judaism—A Helping Arm (of Leather) stretched forth from the Clouds—The Auction.

[CHAPTER VII.]

The Shooting-Match—Rosa’s Autumnal Campaign—Considerations concerning Curses, Kisses, and the Militia.

[CHAPTER VIII.]

Scruples as to Payment of Debts—The Rich Pauper’s Sunday Throne-ceremonial—Artificial Flowers on the Grave—New Thistle Seedlings of Contention.

[First Flower Piece.]

The Dead Christ proclaims that there is no God.

[Second Flower piece.]

A Dream within a Dream.

[BOOK III.]

[CHAPTER IX.]

A Potato War with Women—and with Men—A Walk in December—Tinder for Jealousy—A War of Succession on the subject of a piece of checked calico—Rupture with Stiefel—Sad Evening Music.

[CHAPTER X.]

A Lonely New-Year’s Day—The Learned Schalaster—Wooden-leg of Appeal—Chamber Postal Delivery—The 11th of February, and Birth-day of the year 1786.

[CHAPTER XI.]

Leibgeber’s Disquisition on Fame—Firmian’s “Evening Paper”.

[CHAPTER XII.]

The Flight out of Egypt—The Glories of Travel?—The Unknown Bayreuth—Baptism in a Storm—Nathalie and the Hermitage—The most important Conversation in all this Book—An Evening of Friendship.

[CHAPTER XIII.]

A Clock of Human Beings—A Cold Shoulder—The Venner.

[CHAPTER XIV.]

A Lover’s Dismissal—Fantaisie—The Child with the Bouquet—The Eden of the Night, and the Angel at the Gate of Paradise.

[First Fruit Piece.]

Letter of Dr. Victor to Cato the Elder, on the Conversion of I into Thou, He, She, Ye, and They; or the Feast of Kindness of the 20th March.

[Postscript by Jean Paul.]

[BOOK IV.]

[CHAPTER XV.]

Rosa von Meyern—Tone-Echoes and After-Breezes from the loveliest of all Nights—Letters of Nathalie and Firmian—Table-talk by Leibgeber.

[CHAPTER XVI.]

The Homeward Journey, with all its Pleasures—The Arrival at Home.

[CHAPTER XVII.]

The Butterfly Rosa in the Form of Mining Caterpillar—Thorn-crowns, and Thistle-heads of Jealousy.

[CHAPTER XVIII.]

After-Summer of Marriage—Preparations for Death.

[CHAPTER XIX.]

The Apparition—Homecoming of the Storms in August, or the last Quarrel—The Raiment of the Children of Israel.

[CHAPTER XX.]

Apoplexy—The President of the Board of Health—The Notary-Public—The last Will and Testament—The Knight’s Move—Revel, the Morning Preacher—The Second Apoplectic Attack.

[CHAPTER XXI.]

Dr. Œlhafen and Medical Boot and Shoemaking—The Burial Society—A Death’s Head in the Saddle—Frederick II. and his Funeral Oration.

[CHAPTER XXII.]

Journey through Fantaisie—Re-union on the Bindlocher Mountain—Berneck—Man-doubling—Gefrees—Exchange of Clothes—Münchberg—Solo-whistling—Hof—The Stone of Gladness and Double-parting.

[CHAPTER XXIII.]

Days in Vaduz—Nathalie’s Letter—A New Year’s Wish—Wilderness of Destiny and the Heart.

[CHAPTER XXIV.]

News from Kuhschnappel—Woman’s Anticlimax—Opening of the Seventh Seal.

[CHAPTER XXV., AND LAST.]

The Journey—The Churchyard—The Spectre—The End of the Trouble, and of the Book.

PREFACE,

WITH WHICH I WAS OBLIGED TO PUT JACOB OEHRMANN, GENERAL DEALER, TO SLEEP, BECAUSE I WISHED TO NARRATE THE “DOG POST DAYS”[^[4]] AND THESE PRESENT “FLOWER-PIECES,” &C., &C., TO HIS DAUGHTER.

On Christmas Eve of 1794, when I came from the publishers of the two works in question, and from Berlin, to the town of Scheerau, I went straight from the mail coach to the house of Mr. Jacob Oehrmann (whose law affairs I had formerly attended to), having with me letters from Vienna which might be of considerable service to him. A child can see at a glance that at that time there was no idea of anything connected with such a matter as a Preface in my head. It was very cold—being the 24th of December—the street lamps were lighted, and I was frozen as stiff as the fawn which had been my fellow-passenger (a “blind” one[^[5]]), by the coach. In the shop itself, which was full of draughts and other kinds of wind, it was impossible for a preface-maker of any sense, such as myself, to set to work, because there was a young lady preface-maker—Oehrmann’s daughter and shop-girl—already at work making oral prefaces to the little books she was selling—Christmas almanacs of the best of all kinds—duodecimo books, printed on unsized paper indeed, but full of real fragments of the golden and silver ages—I mean, the little books of mottoes, all gold and silver leaf, with which the blessed Christmas gilds its gifts like the autumn, or silvers them over like the winter. I don’t blame the poor shop-wench that, besieged as she was by such a crowd of Christmas Eve customers, she hardly had a nod to throw at me, old acquaintance as I was; and, although I had only that moment arrived from Berlin, she showed me in to her father at once.

All was in a glow in there, Jacob Oehrmann as well as his counting-house. He, too, was sitting over a book, not as a preface-maker, however, but as a registrator and epitomator; he was balancing his ledger. He had added up his balance-sheet twice over already, but, to his horror, the credit side was always a Swiss oertlein (that is, 13½ kreuzers, Zürich currency) more than the debit side. The man’s attention was wholly fixed upon the driving-wheel of the calculating machine inside his head; he hardly noticed me, well as he knew me, and though I had Vienna letters. To mercantile people, who, like the carriers they employ, are at home all the world over, and to whom the remotest trading powers are daily sending ambassadors and envoyés, namely, commercial travellers—to them, I say, it makes little difference whether it be Berlin, Boston, or Byzance, that one happens to arrive from.

Being well accustomed to this commercial indifference to fellow mortals, I stood quietly by the fire, and had my thoughts, which shall here be made the reader’s property.

I cogitated, as I stood at the fire, on the subject of the public in general, and found that I could divide it, like man himself, into three parts—into the Buying-public, the Reading-public, and the Art-public, just as speculative persons have assumed that man consists of Body, Soul, and Spirit. The Body, or Buying-public, which consists of scholars by trade, professional teachers, and people engaged in business—that true corpus callosum of the German empire—buys and uses the very biggest and most corpulent books (works of body), and deals with them as women do with cookery books, it opens them and consults them in order to be guided by them. In the eyes of this class the world contains two kinds of utter idiots, differing from each other only in the direction taken by their crack-brained fancies, those of the one going too much downward, those of the other too much upward; in a word, philosophers and poets. Naudæus, in his ‘Enumeration of the Learned Men who were supposed to be Necromancers in the Middle Ages,’ has admirably remarked that this never was the case with jurists or theologians, but always with philosophers. It is the case to this day with the wise of the world, only that, the noble idea of “wizard” and “witchmaster,”—whose spiritus rector and grand master seems to have been the devil himself—having got degraded to a name applied to great and clever men and conjurors, the philosopher must be content to put up with the latter signification of the term. Poets are in a more pitiable case still; the philosopher is a member of the fourth faculty, has recognised official positions—can lecture on his own subjects; but the poet is nothing at all, holds no state appointment—(if he did he would no longer be “born,” he would be “made” by the Imperial Chancery), and people who can criticise him and pass their opinions upon him throw it in his teeth without ceremony that he makes plentiful use of expressions which are current neither in commerce, nor in synodal edicts, nor in general regulations, nor in decisions of the high court of justiciary, nor in medical opinions or histories of diseases—and that he visibly walks on stilts, is turgid and bombastic, and never copious enough or condensed enough. At the same time, I at once admit that, in the rank thus assigned to the poet, he is treated very much as the nightingale was by Linnæus, which (as he was not taking its song into account) he, no doubt properly, classed among the funny, jerking water-wagtails.

The second part of the public, the Soul, the Reading-public, is composed of girls, lads, and idle persons in general. I shall praise it in the sequel; it reads us all, at any rate, and skips obscure pages, where there’s nothing but talk and argument, sticking, like a just and upright judge, or historical inquirer, to matters of pure fact.

The Art-public, the Spirit, I might, perhaps, leave altogether out of consideration; the few who have a taste, not only for all kinds of taste, and for the taste of all nations, but for higher, almost cosmopolitan beauties, such as Herder, Goethe, Lessing, Wieland and one or two more—an author has little need to trouble himself about their votes, they are in such a minority, and moreover, they don’t read him. At all events, they don’t deserve the dedication with which I, at the fireside, came to the conclusion that I would bribe the great Buying-public, which is, of course, what keeps the book trade going. I resolved, in fact, regularly to dedicate my ‘Hesperus,’ or the ‘Kuhschnappler Siebenkæs,’ to Jacob Oehrmann; and through him, as it were, to the Buying-public. To wit, in this way:—

Jacob Oehrmann is not a man to be despised, I can tell you. He served as porter of the Stock Exchange in Amsterdam for four years, and rang the Exchange bell from 11.45 till 12 o’clock. Soon after this, by scraping and pinching, he became a “pretty rich house” (though he kept a very poor one), and rose to the dignity of seal-keeper of a whole collection of knightly seals pasted on to noble, escheated, promises to pay. True, like celebrated authors, he assumed no municipal offices, preferring to do nothing but write; but the town militia of Scheerau, whose hearts are always in the right place (that is to say, the safest), and who bravely exhibit themselves to passing troops as a watchful corps of observation, insisted upon making him their captain, though he would have been quite content to have been nothing but their cloth contractor. He is honest enough, particularly in his dealings with the mercantile world; and, far from burning the laws of the Church, like Luther, all he burns even of the municipal law is a title or two of the Seventh Commandment, indeed, he only makes a beginning at burning them, as the Vienna censorship does with prohibited books; and even this only in the cases of carriers, debtors, and people of rank. Before a man of this stamp I can, without any qualms of conscience, burn a little sweet-smelling incense, and make his Dutch face appear magnified, to some extent, like a spectre’s through magic vapour.

Now I thought I should portray, in his likeness, some of the more striking features of the great Buying-public; for he is a sort of portable miniature of it—like itself, he cares only for bread-studies, and beer-studies, for no talk but table-talk, no literature but politics—he knows that the magnet was only created to hold up his shop-door key if he chooses to stick it on to it—the tourmaline only to collect his tobacco ashes, his daughter Pauline to take the place of both (although she attracts stronger things, and with greater attractive power than either)—he knows no higher thing in the world than bread, and detests the town painter, who uses it to rub out pencil marks with. He and his three sons, who are immured in three of the Hanse towns, read or write no other, and no less important, books than the waste-book and the ledger.

“May I be d—d,” thought I, as I was warming myself at the stove, “if I can paint the Buying-public to greater perfection than under the name of Jacob Oehrmann, who is but a twig, or fibre, of it; but then it couldn’t possibly know what I meant” it occurred to me; and on account of this error in my calculations, I have to-day hit upon quite another plan.

Just as I had committed my error the daughter came in, rectified her father’s, and brought out the balance correctly. Oehrmann looked at me now, and became to some extent conscious of my existence; and, on my presenting the Vienna epistles by way of credentials (epistles of this kind are more to him than poetical, or St. Pauline, epistles)—from being a mere fresco figure on the wall, as I had been up to that time, I became a something possessed of a mind and a stomach, and I was asked (together with the latter) to stay to supper.

Now, although the critics may set all the cliques and circles of Germany about my ears—aye, and have a new Turkish bell cast specially for the purpose—I mean to make a clean breast of it here, and state in plain words that it was solely on account of the daughter that I came, and that I stayed, there. I knew that the darling would have read all my recent books, if the old man had given her time to do it; and for that very reason it was impossible for me to blink the fact that it was incumbent upon me as a simple duty to talk, if not to sing, her father to sleep, and then tell his daughter all that I had been telling the world, though the agency of the press. This, as of course you perceive, was why I usually came there to have a talk on the evenings of his foreign mail days, when it didn’t take much to put him to sleep.

On the Christmas Eve, then, what I had to do was to condense and abridge my “45 Dog Post Days” into the space of about the same number of minutes; a longish business, rendering a sleep of no brief duration necessary.

I wish Messrs. the Editors and Reviewers, who find much to blame in this proceeding of mine, could have just sat down, for once in their lives, on the sofa beside my namesake Johanna Paulina; they would have related to her most of my biographical histories in those cleverly epitomised forms in which they communicate them in their magazines and papers to audiences of a very different type. They would have been beside themselves with rapture at the truth and felicity of her remarks, at the natural, unaffected, simplicity and sincerity of her manner, at the innocence of her heart, and at her lively sense of humour, and they would have taken hold of her hand, and cried “let the author treat us to comedies half as delicious as this one which is sitting beside us now, and he is the man for us.” Indeed, had these gentlemen, the editors and reviewers, got to know a little more than they do about the art of briefly extracting the pith and marrow of a book, and had they been able to move Pauline just a little more than I think such great critical functionaries could be expected to do; and had they then seen, or more properly, nearly lost sight of, that gentle face of hers as it melted away in a dew of tears (because girls and gold are the softer and the more impressionable the purer they are), and had they, as of course they would have done, in the heavenliness of their emotion, well-nigh clean forgotten themselves, and the snoring father——

Good gracious! I have got into a tremendous state over it myself, and shall keep the preface till to-morrow. It is clear that it must be gone on with in a calmer mood.

I thought I might take it for granted that the master of the house would have tired himself so much with letter-writing on the Christmas Eve, that all that would be wanted to put him to sleep would be some person who should hasten the process by talking in a long-winded and tedious style. I considered myself to be that person. However, at first, while supper was going on, I only introduced subjects which he would understand. While he was plying his spoon and fork, and till grace had been said, a sleep of any duration was more than could be expected of him. Wherefore I entertained him with matter of interest and amusement, such as my blind fellow-passenger (the fawn), one or two stoppages of payment—my opinions on the French War, and the high prices of everything—that Frederick Street, Berlin, was half a mile in length—that there was great freedom, both of the press and of trade, in that city. I also mentioned that in most parts of Germany which I had visited, I had found that the beggar boys were the “revising barristers” of and “lodgers of appeals” against the newspaper writers; that is to say, that the newspaper makers bring to life, with their ink, the people who are killed in battle, and are able to avail themselves of these resurrected ones in the next “affaire;” whilst the soldiers’ children, on the other hand, like to kill their fathers and then beg upon the lists of killed: they shoot their fathers dead for a halfpenny each, and the newspaper evangelists bring them to life again for a penny. And thus these two classes of the community are, in a beautiful manner, by reciprocity of lying, the one the antidote to the other. This is the reason why neither a newspaper writer, nor an orthographer, can strictly adhere to Klopstock’s orthographical rule, only to write what you hear.

When the cloth was off, I saw that it was time for me to set my foot to work at the rocking of Captain Oehrmann’s cradle. My ‘Hesperus’ is too big a book. On other occasions I should have had time enough. On these occasions all I had to do to get the great Dutch tulip to close its petals in sleep was, to begin with wars and rumours of wars—then introduce the Law of Nature, or rather the Laws of Nature, seeing that every fair and every war provides a fresh supply—from this point I had but a short step to arrive at the most sublime axioms of moral science, thus dipping the merchant before he knew where he was into the deepest centre of the health-giving mineral well of truth. Or I lighted up sundry new systems (of my own invention), held them under his nose, attacked and refuted them, benumbing and narcotising him with the smoke till he fell down senseless. Then came freedom! Then his daughter and I would open the window to the stars and the flowers outside, while I placed before the poor famished soul a rich supply of the loveliest poetical honey-bearing blossoms. Such had been my process on previous occasions. But this evening I took a shorter path. As soon as grace was said, I got as near as I could to complete unintelligibility, and proposed to the house of business of Oehrmann’s soul (his body) the following query: whether there were not more Kartesians than Newtonists among the princes of Germany. “I do not mean as regards the animal world,” I continued slowly and tediously. “Kartesius, as we know, is of opinion that the animals are insentient machines, and consequently, man, the noblest of animals, would be improperly comprehended in this dictum; what my meaning is, and what I want to know, is this—do not the majority (of the princes of Germany) consider that the essentiality of a realm consists in Extension, as Kartesius holds that of matter to do, only the minority of them holding, as Newton (a greater man) does of matter, that its essentiality consists in Solidity.”

He terrified me by answering with the greatest liveliness, and as broad awake as you please, “There are only two of them that can pay their way—the Prince of Flachsenfingen and the Prince of——”

At this point his daughter placed a basket of clothes come from the wash upon the table, and a little box of letters upon the basket, and set to work printing her brothers’ names at full length upon their shirts. As she took out of the basket a tall white festival tiara for her father, and took away from him the base Saturday cowl which he had on, I was incited to become as obscure and as long-winded as the night-cap and my own designs called upon me to be.

Now, as there is nothing about which he is so utterly indifferent as my books, and polite literature in all its branches, I determined to settle him, once for all, with this detested stuff. I succeeded in pumping out what follows.

“I almost fear, Captain, that you must have rather wondered that I have never enabled you to make acquaintance in anything like a very detailed or explicit manner with my two latest opuscula, or little works; the elder of the two is, curiously enough, called ‘Dog Post Days,’ and the later ‘Flower-pieces.’ Perhaps, if I just give you a slight idea to-night of the principal points of my forty-five Dog Post Days, and then fetch up with the Flower-pieces this day week, I shall be doing a little towards making amends for my negligence. Of course, it’s my fault alone, and nobody else’s, if you find you don’t quite know what the first of the two may be about—whether you are to suppose it to be a work on heraldry or on insects—or a dictionary of some particular dialect—or an ancient codex—or a Lexicon Homericum—or a collection of inaugural disputations—or a ready reckoner—or an epic poem—or a volume of funeral sermons. It really is nothing but an interesting story, with threads of all the above subjects woven into it, however. I should be very glad myself, Captain, if it were better than it is; and particularly I wish it were written with that degree of lucidity that one could half read it, and half compose it even, in his sleep. I do not know, Captain, quite what your canons of criticism may be, and hence I cannot say whether your taste is British or Greek. I must admit that I shrewdly suspect that it is not much in the book’s favour that there are parts of it to be found—I hope not very many—in which there are more meanings than one, of all kinds of metaphors and flowery styles hashed up together, or an outside semblance of gravity with no reality behind it, but only mere fun (you see Germans insist upon a businesslike style), and (which I am most of all afraid is the case), though the book is of some considerable extent, my attempts at imitating the romances of chivalry so popular in the present day (which so often seem as if they really must have been written by the old artless knights themselves, fellows who were better at wielding the heavy two-handed sword than the light goose quill)—that my attempts, I say, at imitating these romances have scarcely been attended with that amount of success at which I have aimed at attaining. Perhaps, too, I might oftener have offended the modesty and the ears of the ladies, as many men of the world have thought I might; for, indeed, books which do not offend the ears of the great—but only those of the chaste—are not considered the most objectionable.”

I saw here, when too late, that I had struck on a subject which enlivened him up prodigiously. I did, indeed, instantly make a jump to a quite different topic, saying, “it is probably the safest way of all, to have improper books deposited in public libraries, where the librarians are of the usual type, because the rudeness of their manners and their disagreeable behaviour, does more to prevent these books from being read than an edict of the censorship.” But Jacobus would speak out his thought, “Pauline, don’t let me forget that the woman Stenzin hasn’t paid her fine yet.”

It was uncommonly annoying that, just when I got sleep lured on to within a step or two of him, the Captain should all of a sudden draw his trigger and let off a thing calculated to blow all my sleeping powder to the four winds of heaven. There is nobody more difficult to weary than a person who wearies everybody else. I would rather undertake to weary out a lady who happens to have nothing to do in five minutes’ time, than a man of business in as many hours.

Pauline, the darling, anxious to hear the stories which I had accompanied in manuscript to Berlin, put slowly into my hand one by one the following letters from her letterbox: “STORY”—i. e. she wanted to be told the “Dog Post Days” that evening.

So I set to work again, and, with a sigh, began in this way: “The fact is, Mr. Oehrmann, that your humble servant here will soon be setting letters of this sort flying about in Berlin, by his new book, and my ‘Post Days’ may be printed on shirts quite as fine as those your sons’ names are being printed upon, if the people happen to have made their paper from such. But, indeed, I must admit to you that as I was sitting on the coach on my way to Berlin, with my right foot under my manuscripts, and my left beneath a bale of petitions on their way to the Prince of Scheerau, with the army, the only thing I had in the way of a comforting thought was this very natural one, ‘Devil make a better of it all!’ Only he’s just the very last person to do it. For, good heavens! in an age like this present age of ours, when the instruments of universal world history are only being tuned in the orchestra before the concert begins, that is to say, are all grumbling and squeaking together in confusion (which was why on one occasion the tuning of the orchestra pleased a Morocco Ambassador at Vienna much better than the opera itself)—in such an age, when it is so hard to tell the coward from the brave man—him who lets everything go as it pleases from him who strives to do something great and good—those who are withering up from those who are flourishing and promising fruit, just as in winter the fruit-bearing trees look much the same as the dead ones—in such an age, there is only one consolation for an author, one which I have not yet spoken of to-night, and it is this: that, after all, though it be an age in which the nobler kinds of virtue, love, and freedom, are the rarest of Phœnixes and birds of the sun, he can manage to put up with it, and can go on drawing vivid pictures and writing lively descriptions of all the birds in question, until they wing their way to us in the body. Doubtless, when the originals of the pictures have fairly come and taken up their abode here on earth, then will all our panegyrics of them be out of place, and loathsome to the palate, and a mere threshing of empty straw. People who are incapable of business can work for the press.”

“There’s work, and there’s work,” the merchant, wide awake, struck in; “it all depends—Now TRADE keeps a man; but book-writing isn’t much better than spinning cotton, and spinning is next door to begging—not meaning anything personal to yourself. But all the broken-down book-keepers and bankrupt tradesmen take to the making of books—arithmetic books, and so on.”

The public sees what a poor opinion this shopkeeper-captain had of me, because my business was only the making of books, though in old days I had been continually running in to him day and night, as notary depute, for the protesting of bills. I know the sort of view many people take of the convenances of society; but I think anyone on earth will consider that, after being treated in this style, I was to be excused for going quite wild on the spot, and responding to the fellow’s impertinence, although he was no longer quite in his five senses, in no less formidable a manner than by repeating, accurately and without abridgment, my “extra leaflets” from my ‘Hesperus.’

This, of course, was bound to put him to death—sleep, I mean.

And then thousands of propitious stars arose for the daughter and the author—then commenced our feast of unleavened bread—then I could sit down with her at the front window, and tell her all that which the public has for some time had in its hands. Truly there can be nothing sweeter than to some kind tender heart, hemmed in on all sides and besieged by sermons—which cannot refresh itself at so much as a birthday ball, were it only the superintendent’s and his wife’s, nor with a novel, though its author be the family legal adviser: to such a beleaguered famishing heart, I say, it is more delicious than virgin honey to march up with a strong army of relief, and, taking hold of some mesh in the nun’s veil which is over the soul, tear it wider, let her peep through and look out at the glimmer of some flowery eastern land—to wile the tears of her dreams to her waking eyes—to lift her beyond her own longings, and at a stroke set free the fond tender heart, long heavy with yearning, and bound in bitter slavery—to set it free, and to rock it softly up and down in the fresh spring breeze of poesy, while the dewy warmth gives birth to flowers therein of fairer growth than those of the country round.

I had just finished by one o’clock. I had taken only three hours to the three volumes of my story, because I had torn out all the “extra leaves.” “If the father is the Buying-public, the daughter is the Reading-public, and we must not plague her with anything that’s not purely historical,” I said, and sacrificed my most precious digressions, for which, moreover, such an enchanting neighbourhood is not quite the proper soil.

Then the old man coughed, got up from his chair, asked what o’clock it was, wished me good night, and opening the door saw me out (thereby depriving me of a good one), and saw me no more till that night week, on New Year’s Eve.

My readers will remember that I had promised to come on that evening, because I had to make a brief report to my client concerning my “Flower-pieces”—this very book.

I assure the gentle reader that I shall report the events of the evening exactly as they occurred.

I appeared again, then, on the last evening of the year 1794, on the red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne away to the Ocean of Eternity. My client received me with a coldness which I attributed partly to that of the temperature outside (for both men and wolves are most ferocious in hard frost), partly to the Vienna letters which I had—NOT with me; and on the whole, I had but little to say to the fellow on this occasion. As, besides, I was going to leave Scheerau on the New Year’s Day by the Thursday coach, and was very anxious to lay before my dear Pauline some more Paulina, namely these sketches, because I knew that whatever other wares she might find upon her counter, these wouldn’t be among them—I consider that no editor who has any principles whatever can possibly get into a passion at my having duly appeared. Let any hot-headed person of the sort just listen to the plan I had. I wanted first to give to this silent soul-flower the Flower-pieces, two dreams made of flowers put together mosaic-fashion—next the Thorn-pieces,[^[6]] from which I had to break away the thorns, that is, the satires, so that nothing remained but a mere curious story and lastly, the Fruit-piece was to be served up last, as it is in the book itself, by way of dessert; and in this ripe fruit (from which I had previously orally expressed all the chilling ice-apple juice of philosophy, which the press has, however, left in) I meant to appear at the end of the day, myself as Appleworm. This would have led by easy steps to my departure or farewell; for I did not know whether I should ever again see or hear of Pauline, this flower-polypus, stretching out eyeless, palpitating, tentacula, from mere INSTINCT towards the LIGHT. With the old decayed wood on which the polyp was blooming I, of course, having no Vienna letters, had little to do.

But near as it was to the time for wishing new year’s wishes, the old year was doomed to end with wishes unfulfilled.

Yet I have little to blame myself about; for, as soon as ever I came in, I did my best to tire out the live East India House and put him to sleep, and I continued to do so while he sat there. The only agreeable remarks I made to him were, that when he had said some insulting things about my successor, his present legal adviser, I extended them so as to apply them to the legal profession in general, thus elevating the mere pasquinade into the nobler satire: “I always picture lawyers and clients as two strings of people with buckets or purses near a kind of engine for quenching money thirst—the one row, the clients, always passing away with their buckets, or purses, empty, and the other row standing and handing each other buckets or purses full,” said I.

I think it was not otherwise than on purpose, that I painted to him the great Buying-public with lineaments much like his own—for he is a small Buying-public, only a few feet long and broad. In fact, I made on him an experiment to ascertain what the Buying-public itself would say to the following ideas.

“The public of the present day, Captain, is gradually getting to be a flourishing North India Company, and, it seems to me, it will soon rival the Dutch, amongst whom butter and books are articles of export trade only; the attic salt they have a taste for, is that which Benkelszoon used for pickling fish with. Though they have provided Erasmus, in consideration of his salt (of a better quality), with a statue (he never ate salt, by the way), yet I think this was excusable in them, when we remember that they first had one erected to the fish-curer in question. Even Campe, who by no means classes the inventors of the spinning-wheel and of Brunswick beer beneath the constructors and brewers of epic poems, will coincide with me when I say that the German is really being made something of at the present day; that he is positively becoming a serious, solid, well-grounded fellow—a tradesman, a man of business; a man getting past his youthful follies, who knows edible from cogitable matter (when he sees it), and can winnow out the latter from the former; who can distinguish the printer from the publisher, and the bookseller (as the more important) from both; he is becoming a speculative individual who, like the hens who run from a harp string with fox-gut, can’t bear the noise of any poet’s harp whatever, were it strung with the harper’s own heart-strings—and who will soon come to suffer no pictorial art to exist, except upon bales of merchandise,[^[7]] nor any printing except calico-printing.”

Here I saw, to my amazement, that the merchant was asleep already, and had shut the window-shutters of his senses. I was a good deal annoyed that I had been standing in awe of him, as well as talking to him, all this time unnecessarily; I had been playing the part of the Devil, and he that of King Solomon, supposed by the evil one to be alive when he was dead.[^[8]]

Meantime, with the view of not waking him up by means of a sudden change of key, I went on talking to him as if nothing had happened, speaking to him all the time I was slipping away from him further and further towards the window with an exceedingly gradual diminuendo of my tone, as follows:—“And of such a public as this, I quite expect that a time will come when it will value shoe leather much above altar-pieces,[^[9]] and that, when the moral and philosophical credit of any philosopher chances to be in question, its first inquiry of all will be, ‘is the fellow solvent?’ And further, my beloved listener (I continued in the same tone, so as not to run the risk of waking the sleeper by any change in the kind of sound), it is to be hoped and expected that I shall now have an opportunity of going through, for your entertainment, my Flower-pieces, which have not even been committed to paper as yet, and which I can quite easily finish this evening, if he (father Jacobus) will have the goodness to sleep long enough.”

I commenced, accordingly, as follows:—

P.S. But it would be too utterly ridiculous altogether, if I were to have the whole of the Flower and Thorn pieces, which are all in the book itself, printed over again in the preface! At the end of book the first, however, I shall give the continuation and conclusion of this preface, and of the New Year’s Eve, and shall then go on with the second book, so that it may be ready for the Easter fair.

Jean Paul Fr. Richter.

Hof, 7th November, 1796.

WEDDED LIFE, DEATH AND MARRIAGE

OF

F. S. SIEBENKÆS,

Parish Advocate in the royal burgh of Kuhschnappel.

A GENUINE THORN PIECE.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

A WEDDING DAY, SUCCEEDING A DAY OF RESPITE—THE COUNTERPARTS—DISH QUINTETTE IN TWO COURSES—TABLE-TALK—SIX ARMS AND HANDS.

Siebenkæs, parish advocate[^[10]] for the royal borough of Kuhschnappel, had spent the whole of Monday at his attic-window watching for his wife that was to be, who had been expected to arrive from Augspurg a little before service-time, so as to get a sip of something warm before going to church for the wedding.

The Schulrath of the place, happening to be returning from Augspurg, had promised to bring the bride with him as return cargo, strapping her wedding outfit on to his trunk behind.

She was an Augspurger by birth—only daughter of the deceased Engelkraut, clerk of the Lutheran Council—and she lived in the Fuggery, in a roomy mansion which was probably bigger than many drawing-rooms are. She was by no means portionless, for she lived by her own work, not on other people’s, as penisoned court-ladies’-maids do. She had all the newest fashions in bonnets and other headgear in her hands earlier than the richest ladies of the neighbourhood, albeit in such miniature editions that not even a duck could have got them on; and she erected edifices for the female head at a few days’ notice, on a large scale, after these miniature sketches and small-scale plans of them.

All that Siebenkæs did during his long wait was to depose on oath (more than once) that it was the devil who invented seeking, and his grandmother who devised waiting. At length, while it was still pretty early, came, not the bride, but a night post from Augspurg, with an epistle from the Schulrath to say that he and the lady “could not possibly arrive before Tuesday. She was still busy at her wedding-clothes, and he in the libraries of the ex-Jesuits, and of Privy Councillor Zopf, and (among the antiquities) at the city gates.”

Siebenkæs’s butterfly-proboscis, however, found plenty of open honey cells in every blue thistle blossom of his fate; he could now, on this idle Monday, make a final application of the arm file and agate burnisher to his room, brush out the dust and the writing-sand with the feather of a quill from his table, rout out the accumulations of bits of paper and other rubbish from behind the mirror, wash, with unspeakable labour, the white porcelain inkstand into a more dazzling whiteness, and bring the butter-boat and the coffee-pot into a more advanced and prominent position (drawing them up in rank and file on the cupboard), and polish the brass nails on the grandfather’s leather arm-chair till they shone again. This new temple-purification of his chamber he undertook merely by way of something to do; for a scholar considers the mere arranging of his books and papers to be a purification as of the temple, at least so maintained the parish advocate, saying further, “orderliness is, properly defined, nothing but a happy knack which people acquire of putting a thing for twenty years in the old place, let that place be where it will.”

Not only was he tenant of a pleasant room, but also of a long red dining-table, which he had hired and placed beside a commoner one; also of some high-backed arm-chairs: moreover the landlords or proprietors of the furniture and of the lodgings (who all lived in the house) had all been invited by him to dinner on this his play Monday, which was an excellent arrangement, inasmuch as—most of the people of the house being working-men—their play Monday and his fell together; for it was only the landlord who was anything superior, and he was a wig-maker.

I should have had cause to feel ashamed of myself had I gone and used my precious historical colours in portraying a mere advocate of the poor (a fit candidate for his own services in that capacity). But I have had access to the documents and accounts relating to my hero’s guardianship during his minority, and from these I can prove, at any hour, in a court of justice, that he was a man worth at least 1200 Rhenish guldens (i.e. 100l.), to say nothing of the interest. Only, unfortunately, the study of the ancients, added to his own natural turn of mind, had endowed him with an invincible contempt for money, that metallic mainspring of the machinery of our human existence, that dial plate on which our value is read off, although people of sense, tradespeople for example, have quite as high an opinion of the man who acquires, as of him who gets rid of it; just as a person who is electrified gets a shining glory round his head whether the fluid be passing into or out of him. Indeed, Siebenkæs even said (and on one occasion he did it) that we ought sometimes to put on the beggar’s scrip in jest, simply to accustom the back to it against more serious times. And he considered that he justified (as well as complimented) himself in going on to say, “It is easier to bear poverty like Epictetus than to choose it like Antoninus; in the same way that it is easier for a slave to stick out his own leg to be cut off, than for a man who wields a sceptre a yard long to leave the legs of his slaves alone.” Wherefore he made shift to live for ten years in foreign parts, and for half a year in the imperial burgh, without asking his guardian for a single halfpenny of the interest of his capital. But as it was his idea to introduce his orphan, moneyless bride as mistress and overseer into a silver mine all ready opened and timbered for her reception (for such he considered his 100l. with the accumulated interest to be), it had pleased him to give her to understand, while he was in Augspurg, that he had nothing but his bare bread, and that what little he could scrape together by the sweat of his brow, went from hand to mouth, though he worked as hard as any man, and cared little about the Upper House of Parliament or the Lower. “I’ll be handed,” he had long ago said, “if I ever marry a woman who knows how much I have a year. As it is, women often look upon a husband as a species of demon, to whom they sign away their souls—often their child—that the evil one may give them money and eatables.”

This longest of summer days and Mondays was followed by the longest of winter nights (which is impossible only in an astronomical sense). Early next morning, the Schulrath Stiefel drove up, and lifted out of the carriage (fine manners have twice their charm when they adorn a scholar) a bonnet-block instead of the bride, and ordered the rest of her belongings, which consisted of a white tinned box, to be unloaded, while he, with her head under his arm, ran upstairs to the advocate.

“Your worthy intended,” he said, “is coming directly. She is getting ready at this moment, in a farm cottage, for the sacred rite, and begged me to come on before, lest you should be impatient. A true woman, in Solomon’s sense of the term, and I congratulate you most heartily.”

“The Heir Advocate Siebenkæs, my pretty lady?—I can conduct you to him myself. He lodges with me, and I will wait upon you this moment,” said the wig-maker, down at the door, and offered his hand to lead her up: but, as she caught sight of her second bonnet-block, still sitting in the carriage, she took it on her left arm as if it had been a baby (the hairdresser in vain attempting to get hold of it), and followed him with a hesitating step into the advocate’s room. She held out her right hand only, with a deep curtsey and gentle greeting, to her bridegroom, and on her full round face (everything in it was round, brow, eyes, mouth, and chin) the roses far out-bloomed the lilies, and were all the prettier to look upon as seen below the large black silk bonnet; while the snow-white muslin dress, the many-tinted nosegay of artificial flowers, and the white points of her shoes, added charm upon charm to her timid figure. She at once untied her bonnet—there being barely time to get one’s hair done and be married—and laid her garland, which she had hidden at the farm that the people might not see it, down upon the table, that her head might be properly put to rights, and powdered for the ceremony (as a person’s of quality ought to be) by the landlord, thus conveniently at hand.

Thou dear Lenette! A bride is, it is true, during many days, for everyone whom she’s not going to many, a poor meagre piece of shewbread—and especially is she so to me. But I except one hour, namely, that on the morning of the wedding-day, when the girl, whose life has been all freedom hitherto, trembling in her wedding dress, overgrown (like an ivied tree) with flowers and feathers, which, with others like them, fate is soon to pluck away—and with anxious pious eyes overflowing on her mother’s heart for the last and loveliest time; this hour, I say, moves me, in which, standing all adorned on the scaffold of joy, she celebrates so many partings, and one single meeting: when the mother turns away from her and goes back to her other children, leaving her, all fainthearted, to a stranger. “Thou heart, beating high with happiness,” I think then, “not always wilt thou throb thus throughout the sultry years of wedded life; often wilt thou pour out thine own blood, the better to pass along the path to age, as the chamois hunter keeps his foot from sliding by the blood from his own heel.” And then I would fain go out to the gazing, envious virgins by the wayside leading to the church, and say to them, “Do not so begrudge the poor girl the happiness of a, perhaps fleeting, illusion. Ah, what you and she are looking at to-day is the strife- and beauty-apple of marriage hanging only on the sunny side of love, all red and soft; no one sees the green sour side of the apple hidden in the shade. And if ye have ever been grieved to the soul for some luckless wife who has chanced, ten years after her wedding, to come upon her old bridal dress, in a drawer, while tears for all the sweet illusions she has lost in these ten years rise in a moment to her eyes, are you so sure it will be otherwise with this envied one who passes before you all joy and brightness now?”

I should not, however, have performed this unexpected modulation into the “remote key” of tenderheartedness, had it not been that I managed to form to myself a picture so irresistibly vivid of Lenette’s myrtle wreath, beneath her hat (I really had not the slightest intention to touch on the subject of my own personal feelings), and her being all alone without a mother, and her powdery white-flower face, and (more vivid still) of the ready willingness with which she put her young delicate arms (she was scarcely past nineteen) into the polished handcuffs and chain-rings of matrimony, without so much as looking round her to see which way she was going to be led by them——

I could here hold up my hand and take oath that the bridegroom was quite as much moved as myself, if not more so; at all events, when he gently wiped the Auricula dust from the blossom-face, so that the flowers there were seen to bloom unobscured. But he had to be careful how he carried about that heart of his—so full to the brim of the potion of love, and tears of gladness—lest it should run over in the presence of the jovial hairdresser and the serious Schulrath, to his shame. Effusion was a thing he never permitted himself. All strong feeling, even of the purest, he hid away, and hardened over: he always thought of poets and actors, who let on the waterworks of their emotions to play for show; and there was no one, on the whole, at whom he bantered so much as at himself. For these reasons, his face to-day was drawn and crinkled by a queer, laughing, embarrassment, and only his eyes, where the moisture gleamed, told of the better side of this condition. As he noticed presently that he wasn’t masking himself sufficiently by merely playing the part of barber’s mate, and commissary of provisions (of the breakfast), he adopted stronger measures, and began to exhibit himself and his movable property in as favourable a light as possible to Lenette, inquiring of her whether she didn’t think her room “nicely situated,” and saying, “I can see into the senate house window, on to the great table, and all the ink bottles. Several of these chairs I got last spring at a third of their value, and very handsome they are, don’t you think so? My good old grandfather’s chair here, though” (he had sat down in it, and laid his lean arms on the chair’s stuffed ones), “does, I think, take the precedence in the grandfather dance:[^[11]] ‘how they so softly rest,’ arm upon arm! The flowers upon my table-cloth are rather cleverly done, but the coffee-tray is considered the better work of the two, I am given to understand, on account of its flora being japanned; however, they both do their best in the flower line. My Leyser with his pigskin ‘Meditations’ is a great ornament to the room: the kitchen, though, is the place—better still than this room; there are pots, all ranged side by side—and all sorts of things—the hare-skinner and the hare-spit—my father used to shoot the hares for these.”

The bride smiled on him so contentedly that I must almost believe she had heard the greater part of the story of the 100l. (with interest) in her Fuggery through twenty united ear- and speaking-trumpets. I shall be the more inclined to believe this if the public should happen to be looking forward eagerly to the hour when he is to hand it over to her.

It may not be otherwise than agreeable to my fair readers to be informed that the bridegroom now put on a liver-coloured dress coat, and that he walked to the church with his dress-maker without any dress cravat, and with no queue in his hair, picturing as he went, to his own satirical delight, the slanderous glances with which the fair Kuhschnappelers were following the good stranger girl across the market to the sacrificial altar of her maiden name. He had said on a previous occasion, “We ought rather to facilitate than obstruct backbiting, to a moderate extent, in a married woman, as some slight compensation for lost flatteries.”

The Schulrath Stiefel remained in the bridal chamber, where he sketched the outlines of a critique on a school-programme at the writing-table.

I see before me, as I write, the lovers kneeling at the altar steps; and I should like to cast wishes at them (as flowers are thrown), especially a wish that they may be like the married in Heaven, who, according to Swedenborg’s vision, always merge into one angel—although on earth, too, they are often fused, by warmth, into one angel, and that a fallen one—the husband (who is the head of the wife) representing the butting head of this evil one; this wish, I say, I would fain cast at them; but my attention, in common with that of all the wedding company is riveted by an extraordinary circumstance and puzzling apparition behind the music desks of the choir.

For there appears there, looking down at us—and we all looking up at it—Siebenkæs’s spirit, as the popular expression has it, i.e. his body, as it ought to be called. If the bridegroom should look up he might turn pale, and think he saw himself. We are all wrong; he only turns red. It was his friend Leibgeber who was standing there, having many years ago vowed to travel any distance to his marriage, solely that he might laugh at him for twelve hours’ time.

There has seldom been a case of a royal alliance between two peculiar natures like that between these two. The same contempt for the childish nonsense held in this life to be noble matter, the same enmity to all pettiness and perfect indulgence to the little, the same indignation with dishonourable selfishness, the same delight in laughing in this lovely madhouse of an earth, the same deafness to the voice of the multitude, but not to that of honour; these are but some of the first at hand of the similarities which made of these two but one soul doing duty in two bodies. And the fact that they were also foster-brothers in their studies, having for nurses the same branches of knowledge, including the Law herself, I do not reckon among their chief resemblances; for it is often the case that the very identity of study becomes a dissolving decomponent of friendship. Indeed, it was not even the dissimilarity of their opposite poles which determined their mutual attraction for each other (Siebenkæs leant towards forgiving, Leibgeber towards punishing; the former was more a satire of Horace, the latter a street ballad of Aristophanes with unpoetic as well as poetic harshnesses). But, as two female friends are fond of being dressed alike, these two men’s souls had put on just the same frock-coat and morning costume of life; I mean, two bodies of identical fashion, colour, button-holes, finishings, and cut. Both had the same flash of the eyes, the same earthy coloured face, the same tallness, leanness, and everything. And indeed, the Nature freak of counterpart faces is commoner than we suppose, because we only notice it when some prince or great person casts a corporeal reflection.

For which reason I very much wish that Leibgeber had not had a slight limp, so that he might not have been thereby distinguishable from Siebenkæs, seeing, at least, that the latter had cleverly etched and dissolved away his own peculiar mark by causing a live toad to breathe its last above it. For there had been a pyramidal mole near his left ear, in the shape of a triangle, or of the zodiacal light, or a turned-up comet’s tail, of an ass’s ear in short. Partly from friendship, partly from the enjoyment they had in the scenes of absurdity which their being confounded with each other gave rise to in every-day life, they wished to carry the algebraic equation which existed between them yet a step further, by adopting the same Christian and surname. But on this point they had a friendly contest, as each wanted to be the other’s namesake, till at length they settled the difference by exchanging names, thus following the example of the natives of Otaheite, among whom the lovers exchange names as well as hearts.

As it is now several years since my hero was thus lightened of his worthy name by this friendly name-stealer receiving the other worthy name in exchange, I can’t do anything to alter this in my chapters. I must go on calling him Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs as I did at the beginning, and the other Leibgeber; although it is quite unnecessary for any reviewer to point out to me that the more comic name of Siebenkæs would have been better suited to this more humoristic newcomer, with whom, however, the world shall yet be better acquainted than I am myself.

When these two counterparts caught sight of one another in the church, their blushing faces crinkled and curled oddly, at which the looker-on laughed, until he compared the faces with the eyes, which glowed warm with the deepest affection. While the wedding-rings were being exchanged, Leibgeber in the choir took from his pocket a pair of scissors and a quarto sheet of black paper, and cut out a distant view of the bride’s profile. This cutting out of likenesses he generally gave out as being his cookshop and bakery upon his perpetual journeyings; and as it appears that this strange man does not choose to disclose upon what eminences the waters gather which well up for him down in the valleys, I am glad to quote (and express my own belief in) a frequent saying of his regarding his profile cutting—“In the process of clipping, slices of bread, we know, fall with the cuttings for the bookbinder, the letter-writer, and the lawyer, when the paper is white; but in clipping black paper, whether profiles or white mourning letters with black borders, there fall many more: and if a man is versed in the liberal art of painting his fellow Christian blacker than he is—with more members than one—the tongue for instance can do it to some extent—then Fortune, the Babylonish harlot, will ring that man’s bells (his dinner bell, and his little altar bell), till her arm is half crippled.”

While the deacon was laying his hands on the pair, Leibgeber came down and stood at the red velvet steps of the altar. And when the ceremony was over he made, on the occasion of a meeting such as this, after a separation of some half-a-year or so, the following somewhat lengthy speech:—

“Good morning, Siebenkæs.”

They never said more to each other, though years might have elapsed; and at the resurrection of the dead, Siebenkæs will answer him, just as he did to-day,—

“Good morning, Leibgeber.”

The twelve hours of banter, however, which friends often find it an easy matter to threaten each other with in absence, are an impossibility to the tender heart, keenly enough alive though it may be to the humorous sides of matters, when it is moved (as in this case) at the sight of the friend passing into the vestibule of some new labyrinth of our subterranean existence.

I have now before my writing-desk the long wedding-table set out; and I am sorry that no painting of it occurs on any of the vases buried at Herculaneum, as it would have been dug out with the rest, and an exact copy of it given in the Herculanean illustrations, so that I could have inserted the copy in place of anything else. Few have a higher opinion of the powers of my pen than I have myself; but I see quite well that it is neither in my power nor in my pen’s to half portray, and that in a feeble style, how the guests—there were almost as many there as there were chairs—enjoyed themselves at the dinner; how, moreover, there was not one single rogue among them (for the bridegroom’s guardian, Heimlicher von Blaise, had sent an excuse, saying he was very sick indeed); how the landlord of the house, a jovial, consumptive Saxon, did something towards expediting his departure from this life by his powdering and his drinking; how they banged the glasses with the forks, and the table with the marrowbones, that the former might be filled and the latter emptied; how in all the house not a soul, not even the shoemaker or the bookbinder, did a stroke of any other work but eating, and how even the old woman Sabel (Sabine) who squatted under the mouse-coloured town gate, shut up her stall on this one day before the closing of the gate; how not only was there one course served up, but a second, a “Doppelgänger.” To anyone, indeed, who has dined at great men’s tables, and there remarked how fine dishes, if there are two courses, have got to be marshalled according to the laws of rank, it will not appear unheard of or over splendid that Siebenkæs (the hairdresser’s wife had done the cooking on this occasion) provided for the first course.

1. In the centre the soup-tub, or broth fishpond, wherein people could enjoy the sport of crayfish-catching with their spoons, although the crayfish, like the beavers, had in this water no more than Robespierre had in the convent—that is to say, merely the tail.

2. In the first quarter of the globe a beautiful beef torso, or cube of meat, as pedestal of the entire culinary work of art.

3. In the second, a fricassée, being a complete pattern-card of the butcher’s shop, sweetly treated.

4. In the third, a Behemoth of pond-carps, which might have swallowed the prophet Jonah, but which underwent his fate itself.

5. In the fourth, a baked hen-house of a pie, to which the birds had sent their best members, as a community does to parliament.

I cannot deny myself and my fair readers the pleasure of just slightly sketching for them a little “cookery-piece” of the second course.

1. In the middle stood, as a basket of garden-flowers might, a pile of cress-salad. 2. Then the four corners were occupied by the four syllogistic figures, or the four faculties. In the first corner of the table was, as first syllogistic figure and faculty, a hare, who, as antipode of a barefooted friar, had kept on his natural fur boots in the pan, and who, as Leibgeber justly remarked, had come from the field with his legs safe and sound in spite of the enemy’s fire, more fortunate, in this respect, than many a soldier. The second syllogistic figure consisted of a calf’s tongue, which was black, not from arguing, but from being smoked. The third, crisped colewort, but without the stalks: this, ordinarily the food of the two preceding faculties, was on this occasion eaten along with them; thus is it that in this world one goes up and another down. The concluding figure was made up of the three figures of the bridal pair and an eventual baby baked in butter; these three glorified bodies, which, like “the three children,” had come forth unscathed from the fiery furnace, and had raisins for souls, were eaten up bodily, skin and bones, by those cannibals the guests, with the exception of an arm or so of the infant, which, like the bird Phœnix, was personified ere it existed.

This picture draws me on. But it ought to be coloured, and as regards the luxury of the feast, it would not be passing it over too lightly were I to compare it to a Saxon electoral banquet, by reference to which I might illustrate it. It is true, the electors of that country require a good deal (and on that account they used to be weighed every year); and I am quite aware that at the beginning of the 16th century, a Saxon treasurer made the following entry in his accounts:—“This day was our gracious sovereign at the wine, with his court, for which I have had to disburse the sum of fifteen gulden (25s.). That’s what I call banquetting!” But what would the Saxon treasurer have written? how he would have lifted his hands up with amazement if he had read in my very first chapter that a poor’s advocate had gone and spent three gulden and seven groschen more than his royal master!

As is the case with many natural springs, the fountains of mirth, which welled but slowly in the daytime, jetted up higher in the hearts of the guests as the evening came on. The two advocates indeed told the company that, as they remembered from their college days, though the privilege formerly possessed by every German of drinking his fill had been but too much curtailed by emperors and parliaments, and the imperial decrees of 1512, 1531, 1548, and 1577 permitted no drunkenness, yet they did not prohibit Kuhschnappel from exercising the right common to all imperial states, of abrogating imperial statutes in cases where local laws exist within their own boundaries. The Schulrath alone could not quite see (and he shook his head about it internally to himself twenty times) how two scholars, two lawyers at all events, could go on gravely joking with a set of such unlearned plebeians and empty heads as were here supported upon elbows;—joking with them, and actually conversing about the utter rubbish which they talked. More than once he spliced on threads of scholarly speech, concerning the newest, most highly elaborated school addresses, as well as sundry critiques on the same, but the advocates would have nothing to do with his threads, but made the bookbinder speak the apprentice speech he made at his admission to the rank of master, to which the shoemaker, of his own motion, stitched and cobbled on one which he had made on a similar occasion.

Siebenkæs remarked to the company in general that in the upper circles of society people are much graver, and more tedious, and empty than in the lower; that in the former, if any party happens to come to an end without accursed tedium, people talk of it for a whole week, whereas in the latter everyone contributes so much to the merry picnic of conversation that the only thing there generally is not enough of, is beer. “Oh!” he went on, “if everyone of our condition would but think of it, he would but envy those of a lower; how accurately, in a figurative sense too, does that old truth hold good, that coarse linen keeps one much warmer than fine linen, or even silk, just as a wooden house is easier warmed than a stone one—and the stone one again doesn’t get cool so soon as the wooden in summer—or as coarse brown flour is much more nourishing than the fine white, as all the doctors tell us. And I cannot bring myself to believe that ladies in Paris who wear diamond hairpins, lead half such happy lives as the women there who get their living by picking up old hairpins out of the street sweepings; and many a one whose fuel is nothing but dry fir-cones, gathered by himself as a substitute for fir-fuel” (here the fuel economising company thought vividly of their own case), “is often quite as well off on the whole as people who can preserve green cones in sugar and eat them.”

“Friend Parish Advocate,” said Leibgeber, “there you hit it! In the tap-room and the bar-parlour the worst is at the beginning, the blow, the kick, the angry word come first of all; the pleasure swells with the reckoning. The reverse is the case in the palace; in a ‘palais’ for the ‘palais’ everybody’s enjoyment goes into his mouth at the same instant; just as the little Aphides on the leaves all lift up their tail-ends, and squirt out the honey at the same moment,[^[12]] in the palace it is absorbed with like simultaneousness and sociability. Tediousness, again, annoyance and satiety, are only mixed up ingeniously among the various pleasures which are served up and administered in the course of a great entertainment, just as we give a dog an emetic by rubbing him all over with it, so that he may bring it to operate by licking it slowly off.”

And other similar sayings were spoken. When once any pleasure has reached a considerable height, its natural tendency is to become greater. Many of the lower class members of the sitting exercised the privilege of drink, and of the special inquisition, to say “Thou” to one another. Even the gentleman in the red plush coat (the Schulrath was given to wear one in the dog-day holidays) screwed up his lips, and smiled in a seductive manner, as elderly maiden ladies do in the presence of elderly single gentlemen, and gave hints that he had got at home a couple of real Horatian bottles of champagne. “Not sparkling then, I’m sure?” Leibgeber answered inquiringly. The Schulrath, who thought the best kind of champagne exactly the worst, replied with some self-consciousness, “If it isn’t sparkling, well and good, I swear I’ll drink every drop of it myself.” The bottles appeared. Leibgeber, taking the first one, carefully filed through its barrier chain, removed the cork and opened it as if it had been a last will and testament.

What I maintain is, that, even should the two balsam-trees of life, namely wit and the love of our fellow men, be withered away up to the very topmost twig, they can still be brought to life by a proper shower out of the watering pot of these said bottles—in three minutes they will begin to sprout. As the glad, wild essence, the wine of the silver foam, touched the heads of the guests, every brain began to seethe and glow while fair air-castles rose in each amain. Brilliant and many tinted were the floating bubbles blown and set free by the Schulrath Stiefel’s ideas of all categories, his simple as well as his compound ideas, his innate ideas, and also his fixed. And can it ever be forgotten that he ceased to make learned statements, except on the subject of Lenette’s perfections, and that he told Leibgeber in confidence, that he should really like to marry, not indeed, “the tenth Muse, or the fourth Grace, or the second Venus—for it was clear who had got her already but some step-sister goddess, a distant relation or other of hers.” During the whole journey, he said, he had preached from the coachbox, as from a pulpit, enlarging to the bride on the subject of the blessedness of the married state, painting it to her in the brightest colours, and drawing such a lively picture of it, that he quite longed to enter into it himself: and the bridegroom would have thanked him if he had seen how gratefully she had looked at him in return. And, indeed, the bride was a great success, and happy in all she did that day, and particularly that evening; and what became her best of all was that on such a high day as this, she waited upon others more than she let herself be waited upon—that she put on a light every-day dress—that even at this advanced stage of her own education she took private lessons in cookery and household matters from her female guests, who aired their own theories on these subjects—and that she already began to think about to-morrow. Stiefel, in his inspired state, ventured upon exploits which were all but impossible. He placed his left arm under his right, and thus supporting its weight and that of its plush sleeve, in a horizontal position, snuffed the candle before the whole company, and did it rather skilfully on the whole; somewhat like a gardener on a ladder holding out his pruning shears at arm’s length to a high branch and snipping off the whole concern by a slight movement of his hand at the bottom. He asked Leibgeber plump out to give him a profile of Lenette, and later on, when he was going away, he even made an attempt (but this was the only one of his ventures which failed) to get hold of her hand and kiss it.

At length all the joy-fires of this happy little company burnt down like their candles, and one by one the rivers of Eden fell away into the night. The guests and the candles got fewer and fewer; at last there was only one guest there, Stiefel (for Leibgeber is not a guest), and one long candle. It is a lovely and touching time when the loud clamour of a merry company has finally buzzed itself away into silence, and just one or two, left alone, sit quietly, often sadly, listening to the faint echoes, as it were, of all the joy. Finally, the Schulrath struck the last remaining tent of this camp of enjoyment, and departed; but he would not for a moment suffer that those fingers, which, in spite of all their efforts, his lips could not touch, should be clasped about a cold brass candlestick, for the purpose of lighting him downstairs. So Leibgeber had to do this lighting. The husband and wife, for the first time, were alone in the darkness, hand in hand.

Oh, hour of beauty! when in every cloud there stood a smiling angel, dropping flowers instead of rain, may some faint reflection from thee reach even to this page of mine, and shine on there for ever.

The bridegroom had never yet kissed his bride. He knew, or fancied, that his face was a clever one, with sharp lines and angles, expressing energetic, active effort; not a smooth, regular, “handsome” one: and as, moreover, he always laughed at himself and his own appearance, he supposed it would strike other persons in the same light. Hence it was that, although as an every-day matter he rose superior to the eyes and tongues of a whole street (not even taking the pains mentally to snap his fingers at them), he never, except in extraordinary moments of dithyrambics of friendship, had mustered up the courage to kiss his Leibgeber—let alone Lenette. And now he pressed her hand more closely, and in a dauntless manner turned his face to hers (for, you see, they were in the dark, and he couldn’t see her); and he wished the staircase had as many steps as the cathedral tower, so that Leibgeber might be a long time coming back with the candle. Of a sudden there danced (so to speak) over his lips a gliding, tremulous kiss, and—then all the flames of his affection blazed on high, the ashes blown clean away. For Lenette, innocent as a child, believed it to be the bride’s duty to give this kiss. He put his arms about the frightened giver with the courage of bashfulness, and glowed upon her lips with his with all the fire wherewith love, wine and joy had endowed him; but—so strange is her sex—she turned away her mouth, and let the burning lips touch her cheek. And there the modest bridegroom contented himself with one long kiss, giving expression to his rapture only in tears of unutterable sweetness which fell like glowing naphtha-drops upon Lenette’s cheeks, and thence into her trembling heart. She leant her face further away; but in her beautiful wonder at his love, she drew him closer to her.

He left her before his darling friend came back. The tell-tale powder-snow which had fallen on the bridegroom—that butterfly-dust which the very slightest touch of these white butterflies leaves upon our fingers (and hence it was a good idea of Pitt’s to put a tax on powder in 1795)—told some of the story, but the eyes of the friend and the bride, gleaming in happy tears, told him it all. The two friends looked for some time at each other with embarrassed smiles, and Lenette looked at the ground. Leibgeber said, “Hem! Hem!” twice over, and at length, in his perplexity, remarked, “We’ve had a delightful evening!” He took up a position behind the bridegroom’s chair, to be out of sight, and laid his hand on his shoulder, and squeezed it right heartily; but the happy Siebenkæs could restrain himself no longer; he stood up, resigned the bride’s hand, and the two friends, at last, after the long yearning of the long day, as if celebrating the moment of their meeting, stood silently embracing, united by angels, with Heaven all around them. His heart beating higher, the bridegroom would fain have widened and completed this circle of union, by joining his bride and his friend in one embrace; but the bride and the friend took each one side of him, each embracing only him. Then three pure heavens opened in glory in three pure hearts; and nothing was there but God, love, and happiness, and the little earthly tear which hangs on all our joy-flowers, here below.

In this their great joy and bliss, overborne by unwonted emotion, and feeling almost strange to each other, they had scarce the courage to look into each other’s tearful eyes; and Leibgeber went away in silence, without a word of parting or good night.

CHAPTER II.

HOME FUN—SUNDRY FORMAL CALLS—THE NEWSPAPER ARTICLE—A LOVE QUARREL, AND A FEW HARD WORDS—ANTIPATHETIC INK ON THE WALL—FRIENDSHIP OF THE SATIRISTS—GOVERNMENT OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.

There is many a life which is as pleasant to live as to write, and the material of this one, in particular, which I am engaged in writing, is as yet always giving out, like rosewood on the turning lathe, a truly delicious perfume, all over my workshop. Siebenkæs duly arose on the Wednesday, but not till the Sunday was it his intention to deposit in the hands of his diligent house goddess—who put a cap on to her cap-block in the morning before she put one on to herself—the silver ingots from his guardian’s coffer (wrapped in blotting paper), her palisades of refuge in the siege of this life; for in fact he couldn’t do so any sooner, because his guardian had gone into the country, that is to say, out of town, till the Saturday night. “I can give you no notion, old Leibgeber,” said Siebenkæs, “what a joy I feel in looking forward to how this will delight my wife. I’m sure, to give her pleasure, I could wish it were three thousand dollars. The dear child has always hitherto had to live from bonnet to bonnet, but how she will consider herself a woman set up on a sudden for life, when she finds she can carry out a hundred housekeeping projects, which, I see as well as possible, she has got in her head already. And then, old boy, with the money in our hands, we shall begin the keeping of my silver wedding directly, the moment the evening service is over—there shall be a good half-florin’s worth of beer in every room in the house. Look here! why shouldn’t the dove, or call him the sparrow, of my hymen play out beer on the people as the two-headed eagle in Frankfort does wine at a coronation?” Leibgeber answered, “The reason he can’t is, that the prey he catches is of quite another brand. The sour wine (of the Frankfort eagle) is but the grapeskins—the feathers, the wool, and the hair which eagles always eject.”

It would be of no use whatever—because hundreds of Kuhschnappelers would correct my statement in their local paper, the ‘Imperial News’—if I were to tell a falsehood here (which I should like very much to do), and assert that the two advocates spent the short week of their being together with that gravity and propriety which, becoming as they are to mankind in general, do yet more particularly secure to scholars and to the learned the respect and consideration of commoner minds, to say nothing of the Kuhschnappelian intelligences.

Unfortunately I have got to sing to another tune. In the town of Kuhschnappel, as in all other towns, provincial, or metropolitan, what Leibgeber was least of all conspicuous for was a proper gravity of deportment and behaviour. Here, as elsewhere, his first proceeding was to get an introduction to the club, as a stranger artist, in order that he might ensconce himself on a sofa, and, without uttering a word or a syllable to a human being, go to sleep under the noses of the company of the “Relaxation” as the club was called. “This,” he said, “was what he liked to have the opportunity of doing in all towns where there were clubs, casinos, museums, musical societies, &c.; because to sleep in any rational manner at night in one’s ordinary quiet bed was a thing which he, at least, found he was seldom able to manage, on account of the loud battle of ideas which went on in his head, and the firework trains of processions of pictures all interweaving and whirling in and out with such a crash and a din that one could hardly see or hear one’s self. Whereas when one lies down upon a club sofa, everything of this sort quiets itself down, and a universal truce of ideas establishes itself; the delicious effect of the company all talking at once—the happily chosen and appropriate words contributed to the political-and-other-conversation-picnic, of which one distinguishes nothing but an ultima, perhaps, or sometimes only an antepenultima; this alone sings you into a light slumber. But when a more serious discussion arises, and some point is argued, disputed and discussed in all its bearings in a universal clamorous shout—your barometer becomes completely stationary, and you sleep the deep sleep of a flower which is rocked, but not awakened, by the storm.”

One or two towns with which I am acquainted must, I am sure, remember a stranger who always used to go to sleep in their clubs, and must also recollect the beaming expression of countenance with which he would look about him when he got up and took his hat, as much as to say, “Many thanks for this refreshing rest.”

However, I have little to do with Leibgeber’s waking or with his sleeping here in Kuhschnappel; him I may treat with some indulgence, seeing that he is soon to be off again into the wide world. But it is anything but a matter of indifference that my young hero, just established here with his wife, and whose pranks I have undertaken to give some account of, as well as of the hits he gets in return, should go and conduct himself just as if his name was Leibgeber; which had long ceased to be the case, seeing that he had given formal notice to his guardian that he had changed it to Siebenkæs.

To mention but one prank—was it not a piece of true tomfoolery that, when the procession of poor scholars, singing for alms about the streets, were just beginning their usual begging hymn under the windows of the best religious families on the opposite side of the street, and just as they had struck their key-note and were going to start off with their chorus, Leibgeber, to begin with, made his boar-hound “Saufinder” (he couldn’t live without a big dog) look out of window with a fashionable lady’s night-cap on his head? And was it by any means a soberer proceeding on Siebenkæs’s part, that he took lemons and bit into them before the eyes of the whole singing class, so that all their teeth begun to water in an instant? The result will answer these questions for itself. The singers, having Saufinder in his night-cap in full view, could no more bring their lips together into a singing position than a man can whistle and laugh at the same instant. At the same time all their vocal apparatus being completely submerged by the opening of their glands, every note they attempted to give out had to wade painfully through water. In short, was this entire ludicrous interruption of the whole company of street singers not the precise end aimed at by both the advocates?

But Siebenkæs has only recently come back from college, and being still half-full of the freedom of university life, may be excused a liberty or two. And indeed I consider the little exuberances of university youth to be like the adipose matter, which, according to Reaumur, Bonnet, and Cuvier, is stored up by the caterpillar for the nourishment of the future butterfly during its chrysalis state; the liberty of manhood has to be alimented by that of youth, and if a son of the muse has not room given him to develop in full freedom, he will never develop into anything but some office-holder creeping along on all fours.

Meanwhile the two friends spent the following days—not wholly in a disorderly manner—in the writing of marriage cards. With these, on which of course there was nothing but the words, “Mr. Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs, Poor’s Advocate, and his wife, née Engelkraut; with compliments.”—with these papers, and with the lady, they were both to drive about the town on the Saturday, and Leibgeber had to get down at all the respectable houses and hand in a card, which is by no means otherwise than a laudable and befitting custom in towns where people observe the usages of good society. But the two brethren, Siebenkæs and Leibgeber, appeared to follow these usages of imperial and rural towns more from satirical motives than anything else, conforming to them pretty minutely, it is true, but clearly chiefly for the fun of the thing, each of them playing the part of first low comedian and of audience at the same time. It would be an insult to the borough of Kuhschnappel to suppose that, notwithstanding Siebenkæs’s zealous readiness to join in all the processions of the little place, in and out of churches, to the town hall and the shooting-ground, it was wholly unobservant of the satisfaction which it afforded him rather to make fun of some properly ordered cortége, and mar the effect of it by his unsuitable dress and absurd behaviour, than to be an ornament to it. And the genuine eagerness with which he tried to get admitted as a member of the Kuhschnappel shooting-club was ascribed rather to his love of a joke than to his being the son of a keen sportsman. As for Leibgeber, he of course has the very devil in him as regards all such matters; but he is younger than Siebenkæs, and about to set out on his travels.

So they drove about the town on the Saturday—and where anybody in the shape of a grandee lived they stopped, left their passengers’ tickets and drove on, without any misbehaviour. Many ladies and gentlemen, it is true, got the wrong sow by the ear, and confounded the card carrier with the young husband sitting in the carriage; but the card carrier maintained his gravity, knowing that fun has its own proper time. The cards (some of which were glazed) were delivered according to the directory, firstly to the members of the government, both of the greater and lesser council—to the seventy members of the greater, and the thirteen of the lesser council; consequently the judge, the treasurer, the two finance councillors, the Heimlicher (so to say, tribune of the people) and the remaining eight ordinary members—these constituting the said lesser council—each received his card. After which the carriage drove down lower, and provided the minor government officials in the various chambers and offices with their cards, such as the Offices of Woods, of the Game Commissioners, the Office of Reform (which latter was for the repression of luxury), and the Meat Tax Commission, which was presided over by a single master butcher, a very nice old man.

I am much afraid I have made a considerable slip, inasmuch as I have drawn up no tables relative to the constitution, &c., of this imperial borough of Kuhschnappel (which is properly a small imperial town, though it was once a large one) to lay before the learned and statistical world. However, I can’t possibly pull up here in the full gallop of my chapter, but must wait till we all get to the end of it, when I can more conveniently open my statistical warehouse.

The wheel of fortune soon began to rattle, and throw up mud; for when Leibgeber took his eighth part of a placard of Siebenkæs’s marriage to the house of his guardian, the Heimlicher von Blaise, a tall, meagre, barge-pole of a woman, wrapped up in wimples of calico, the Heimlicher’s wife, received it indeed, and with warmth, but warmth of the sort with which we generally administer a cudgelling; moreover, she uttered the following words (calculated to give rise to reflection)—

“My husband is the Heimlicher of this town, and what is more, he’s away from home. He has nothing to do with seven cheeses;[^[13]] he is tutor and guardian to persons belonging to the highest and noblest families. You had better be off as fast as you like; you’ve got hold of the wrong man here.”

“I quite think we have, myself,” said Leibgeber.

Siebenkæs, the ward, here tried to pacify his letter or paper carrier with the woman a little, by suggesting that, like every good dog, she was but barking at the strangers before fetching and carrying for them: and when his friend, more anxious than himself, said, “You’re quite sure, are you not, that you took proper legal precautions against any venomous ‘objections’ which the guardian might make to paying up your money, on account of your changing your name?” he assured him, that before he had established himself as Siebenkæs, he had procured his guardian’s opinion and approval in writing, which he would show him when they got home.

But when they did get home, Von Blaise’s letter was nowhere to be found—it wasn’t in any of the boxes, nor in any of the college note-books, nor even among the wastepaper—in fact, there was nothing of the kind.

“But what a donkey I am to bother about it!” cried Siebenkæs, “what do I require it for, at all?”

Here Leibgeber, who had been glancing at the Saturday newspapers, suddenly shoved them into his pocket, and said in a somewhat unwonted tone of voice, “Come out, old boy, and let’s have a run in the fields.” When they got there, he put into his hands the ‘Schaffhausen News,’ the ‘Swabian Mercury,’ the ‘Stuttgart Times,’ and the ‘Erlangen Gazette,’ and said, “These will enable you to form some idea of the sort of scoundrel you have for a guardian.”

In each of these newspapers, the following notification appeared:—

“Whereas, Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, now in his 29th year, proceeded to the University of Leipzig in 1774, but since that date has not been heard of: now the said Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, is hereby, at the instance of his cousin, Herr Heimlicher von Blaise, edictally cited and summoned by himself or the lawful heirs of his body, within six months from the date of these presents (whereof two months are hereby constituted the first term, two months the second, and two months the third and peremptory term), to appear within the Inheritance Office of this borough, and, on satisfactory proof of identity, to receive over the sum of 1200 Rhenish gulden deposited in the hands of the said Heimlicher von Blaise as trustee and guardian; which failing, that, as directed by the decree of council of 24th July 1655 (which enacts, that any person who shall be for ten years absent from the realm, shall be taken pro mortuo), the above-named sum of 1200 Rhenish florins may be made over and paid to his said guardian and trustee, the aforesaid Heimlicher von Blaise. Dated at Kuhschnappel in Swabia, the 20th August, 1785.

“Inheritance Office of the free Imperial Borough of Kuhschnappel.”

It is unnecessary to remind the legal reader that the decree of council referred to is not in accordance with the legal usage of Bohemia, where thirty-one years is the stipulated period, but with that which formerly prevailed in France, when ten years were sufficient. And when the advocate came to the end of the notice, and stared, motionless, at its concluding lines, his soul’s brother took hold of his hand, and cried, “Alas! alas! it is I who am to blame for all this, for changing names with you.”

“You?—oh, you? The devil alone, and nobody else. But I must find that letter,” he said, and they made another search all over the house, in every corner where a letter could be. After an hour of this Leibgeber hunted out one with a broken seal of the guardian, of which the thick paper, and the broad legal fold, without an envelope, told unmistakeably that it had been addressed neither by a lady, a merchant, nor courtier, but by the quill of a bird of quite a different tribe. However, there was nothing in this letter, except Siebenkæs’s name in Siebenkæs’s own writing—not another word, outside or inside. Quite natural; for the advocate had a bad habit of trying his hand and his pen on the backs of letters, and writing his own name and other people’s as well, with flourishes about them.

The letter had once been written in the inside, but, to save an incredible waste of good paper, the Heimlicher von Blaise had written his concurrence in the exchange of the names with an ink which vanishes from the paper of itself, and leaves it, in integrum, white as it was before it was written on.

I may, perhaps, be doing a chance service to many persons of the better classes, who nowadays more than ever have occasion to write promissory notes and other business documents, if I here copy out for them the receipt for this ink which vanishes after it is dry; I take it from a reliable source. Let the man of rank scrape off the surface from a piece of fine black cloth, such as he wears at court—grind the scrapings finer still on a piece of marble—moisten this fine cloth dust repeatedly with water, then make his ink with this, and write his promissory note with it; he will find that, as soon as the moisture has evaporated, every letter of the promissory note has flown away with it in the form of dust; the white star will have shone out, as it were, through the blackness of the ink.

But I consider that I am doing an equal service to the holders and presenters of such promissory notes as to the drawers of them, inasmuch as, for the future, they will be careful not to be satisfied with a security of this description, till they have exposed it for some time to the sun.

Some time ago, I should have here been apt to confound this cloth ink with the sympathetic ink (likewise possessing the property of turning pale and disappearing after a time), which is commonly made use of in both the preliminary and final treaties entered into between royal persons; the latter however, has a red tint. A treaty of peace of three years’ standing is no longer legible to a man in the prime of life, because the red ink—the encaustum, with which formerly no one but the Roman emperors might write—is too apt to turn pale, unless a sufficient number of human beings (from whom, as from the cochineal insect, this dye stuff is prepared) have been made use of in its manufacture; and this (from motives of sordid parsimony) is not always the case. So that the treaty has frequently to be engraved and etched into the territory afresh with good instruments—the so-called “instruments of peace”—at the point of the bayonet.

The two friends kept the happy young wife in ignorance of this first thunderclap of the storm which was threatening her married life. On the Sunday morning they went to make a friendly call on the Heimlicher during the church service; unfortunately he was at church, however. They postponed their entertaining visit till the afternoon; but then he himself was paying one to the chapel of the orphan asylum, the whole blooming body of the orphans, boys and girls, having previously made one to him, to enjoy the privilege of kissing his hand in his capacity of superintendent of the orphan asylum; for the inspectorship of that institution was, as he modestly but truly observed, entrusted to his unworthy hands. After the evening sermon, he had to perform a service of his own in his own house, in short, he was fenced off from the two advocates by a triple row of spiritual altar rails. It was his admirable custom to permit the members of his household, not indeed to eat, but to pray at the same table with him. He thought it well to spend the Sunday as a day of labour in psalm-singing with them, because, by such devotional exercises, he best preserved them from sins of Sabbath breaking, such as working on their own account, at sewing, mending, &c. And, on the whole, he thought it well to make of the Sunday in this manner a day of preparation for the coming week, just as actors in places where Sunday representations are not allowed, have their rehearsals on that day.

However, I recommend people in delicate health not to go near or smell at this sort of beautiful sky-blue plants which grow in the Church’s vineyard only to be looked at, as an English garden is adorned with the pretty aconite and its sky- or Jesuit’s-blue poisonous flowers, which grow pyramidally to man’s height.[^[14]] People like Von Blaise, not only ascend Mount Sinai and the Golgotha, that, like goats, they may feed as they climb; but they occupy these sacred heights for the purpose of making attacks and incursions from them, just as good generals take possession of the hills, and particularly the gallows-hills. The Heimlicher mounts from earth to the heavens oftener than Blanchard does, and with similar motives, indeed, he can keep his soul on the wing in these elevated regions for half a day at a time, in which respect, however, he does not quite equal the King of Siam’s dragon kites which the mandarins, by relieving each other at the task, manage to keep up in the sky for a couple of months at a time. He soars, not as the lark does, to make music, but as the noble falcon does, to swoop down upon something or other. If you see him praying on a Mount of Olives, be sure that he’s going to build an oil mill on it; and if he weeps by a brook Kedron, depend upon it he’s either going a-fishing in it, or else thinking of pitching somebody into it. He prays with the object of luring to him the ignes-fatui of sins; he kneels, but only as a front rank does, to deliver its fire at the foe before it; he opens his arms as with warm benevolent affection, to fold home one, a ward say, in their embrace, but only in the manner of the red-hot Moloch, that he may burn him to cinders; or he folds his arms piously together, but does it as the machines called “maidens” did, only to cut people to pieces.

At last the friends, in their anxiety, came to see that there are some people whom one can only manage to get access to when one comes as thieves do, unannounced so at 8 o’clock on the Sunday evening they walked, sans façon, into Von Blaise’s house. Everything was still and empty; they went through an empty hall into an empty drawing-room, the half-open folding doors of which led into the household chapel. All they could see through the crevice was six chairs, an open hymn-book lying on its face on each of them, and a table with wax-cloth cover, on which were Miller’s ‘Heavenly Kiss of the Soul,’ and Schlichthoher’s ‘Five-fold Dispositions for all Sundays and Feasts of the Church.’ They pressed through the gap, and lo and behold! there was the Heimlicher all alone, continuing his devotions in his sleep, with his cap under his arm. His house- and church-servants had read to him till sleep had stiffened him to a petrifaction, or pillar of salt (an event which occurred every Sunday), for his eyes and his head were alike heavy with the edible, the potable, and the spiritual, refreshment of which he had partaken; or because he was like many who think it well to close their eyes during the sowing of the heavenly seed, just as people do when their heads are being powdered, or because churches and private chapels are still like those ancient temples in which the communications of the oracles were received during sleep. And as soon as they saw his eyes closed, the servants would read more and more softly, to accustom him gradually to the complete cessation of the sound; and, by and by, the devout domestics would steal gently away, leaving him in his attitude of prayer till 10 o’clock; at that hour (when, moreover, Madame von Blaise generally came home from paying visits) the domestic sacristan and night watchman would rouse him from his sleep with a shrill “Amen,” and he would put something on to his bald head again.

This evening matters fell out differently. Leibgeber rapped loudly on the table two or three times with the knuckle of his forefinger to wake the city’s father out of his first sleep. When he opened his eyes and saw before him the two lean parodies and copies of one another, he took, in his beer- and sleep-heaviness of idea, a glass periwig from off a block, and put that on his head instead of his cap, which had fallen down. His ward addressed him politely, saying he wished to present to him his friend with whom he had made the exchange of names. He likewise called him his “kind cousin and guardian.” Leibgeber, more angry and less self-contained, because he was younger, and because the wrong had not been done to him, fired into the Heimlicher’s ears, from a position closer to him by three discourteous paces, the inquiries, “Which of us two is it that your worship has given out pro mortuo, that you may be able to cite him as a dead man? There are the ghosts of two of us here both together.” Blaise turned with a lofty air from Leibgeber to Siebenkæs, and said, “If you have not changed your dress, sir, as well as your name, I believe you are the gentleman whom I have had the honour of talking with on several previous occasions. Or was it you, sir?” he said to Leibgeber, who shook like one possessed. “Well,” he continued in a more pleasant tone, “I must confess to you, Mr. Siebenkæs, that I had always supposed, until now, that you were the person who left this for the university ten years ago, and whose little inheritance I then assumed the guardianship or curatorship of. What probably chiefly contributed to my mistake, if it be a mistake, was, I presume, the likeness which, præter propter, you certainly seem to bear to my missing ward; for in many details you undoubtedly differ from him; for instance, he had a mole beside his ear.”

“The infernal mole,” interrupted Leibgeber, “was obliterated by means of a toad, on my account entirely, because it was like an ass’s ear, and he never thought that, when he lost his ear, he should lose a relative along with it.”

“That may be,” said the guardian coldly, “You must prove to me, Herr Advocate, that it was to YOU I had been thinking of paying over the inheritance to-day; for your announcement that you had exchanged your family name for that of an utter stranger I considered to be probably one of the jokes for which you are so celebrated. But I learned last week that you had been proclaimed in church and married in the name of Siebenkæs, and more to the same effect. I then discussed the question with Herr Grossweibel (the President of the Chamber of Inheritance), and with my son-in-law, Herr von Knärnschilder, and they assured me I should be acting contrary to my duty and safety if I let this property out of my hands. What would you do—they very properly said—what answer would you have to make if the real owner of the name were to appear and demand another settlement of the guardianship accounts? It would be too bad, truly, for a man, who, besides his manifold business of other kinds, undertook this troublesome guardian work, which the law does not require him to do, purely from affection for his relative, and from the love which he bears to all his brethren of mankind[^[15]]—it would be too bad, I say, for him to have to pay up this money a second time out of his own pocket. At the same time, Mr. Siebenkæs, as, in my capacity of a private individual, I am more disposed to admit the validity of your claim than you perhaps suppose, you being a lawyer, know quite as well as I that my individual conviction carries with it no legal weight whatever, and that I have to deal with this matter not as a man, but as a guardian—it would probably be the best course to let some third party less biassed in my favour, such as the Inheritance Office, decide the question. Let me have the satisfaction, Mr. Siebenkæs, as soon as it may be possible” (he ended more smilingly, and laying his hand on the other’s shoulder) “to see that which I hope may prove the case, namely, that you are my long-missing cousin, Leibgeber, properly established by legal proof.”

“Then,” said Leibgeber, grimly calm, and with all kinds of scale-passages and fugatos coursing over the colour-piano of his face, “is the little bit of resemblance which Mr. Siebenkæs there has to—to himself, that is to say, to your worship’s ward, to be taken as proving nothing; not even as much as an equal similarity in a case of comparatio literarum would prove?”

“Oh, of course,” said Blasius, “something, certainly, but not everything; for there were several false Neros, and three or four sham Sebastians in Portugal; suppose, now, you should be my cousin yourself, Mr. Leibgeber!”

Leibgeber jumped up at once, and said in an altered and joyful voice, “So I am, my dearest guardian—it was all done to try you—I hope you will pardon my friend his share in the little mystification.”

“All very well,” answered Blasius, more inflatedly, “but your own changes of ground must show you the necessity for a proper legal investigation.”

This was more than Siebenkæs could endure, he squeezed his friend by the hand, as much as to say, “Pray be patient,” and inquired in a voice which an unwonted feeling of hatred rendered faint, “Did you never write to me when I was in Leipzig?”—“If you are my ward, I certainly did, many times; if you are not, you have got hold of my letters in some other way.”

Then Siebenkæs asked, more faintly still, “Have you no recollection at all of a letter in which you assured me there was not the slightest risk involved in my proposed change of name, none whatever?”

“This is really quite ludicrous,” answered Blaise, “in that case there could be no question about the matter!”

Here Leibgeber clasped the father of the city with his two fingers as if they had been iron rivets, grasped his shoulders as one does the pommel of a saddle at mounting, clamped him firmly into his chair, and thundered out, “You never wrote anything of the kind, did you? you smooth-tongued, grey-headed old scoundrel! Stop your grunting, or I’ll throttle you! never wrote the letter, eh? keep quiet—if you lift a finger, my dog will tear your windpipe out. Answer me quietly you say you never received any letter on the subject, do you?”

“I had rather say nothing,” whispered Blasius, “evidence given under coercion is valueless.”

Here Siebenkæs drew his friend away from the Heimlicher, but Leibgeber said to the dog, “Mordax! hooy, Sau.,” took the glass periwig from the head of the servant of the state, broke off the principal curls of it, and said to Siebenkæs (Saufinder lay ready to spring), “Screw him down yourself, if the dog is not to do it, that he may listen to me. I want to say one or two pretty things to him—don’t let him say ‘Pap!’—Herr Heimlicher von Blasius, I have not the slightest intention of making use of libellous or abusive language to you, or of spouting an improvised pasquinade; I merely tell you, that you are an old rascal, a robber of orphans, a varnished villain, and everything else of the kind—for instance, a Polish bear, whose footmarks are just like a human being’s.[^[16]] The epithets which I here make use of, such as scoundrel—Judas—gallows-bird” (at each word he struck the glass turban like a cymbal against his other hand), “skunk, leech, horse-leech—nominal definitions such as these are not abuse, and do not constitute libel, firstly because, according to ‘L. § de injur.,’ the grossest abuse may be uttered in jest, and I am in jest here—and we may always make use of abusive language in maintaining our own rights—see ‘Leyser.’[^[17]] Indeed, according to Quistorp’s ‘Penal Code,’ we may accuse a person of the gravest crimes without animus injurandi, provided that he has not been already tried and punished for them. And has your honesty ever been put on its trial and punished, you cheating old grey-headed vagabond? I suppose you are like the Heimlicher in Freyburg[^[18]]—rather a different sort of man to you, it’s to be hoped—and have half-a-dozen years or so, during which no one can lay hold of you—but I’ve got hold of you to-day, hypocrite! Mordax!” The dog looked up at this word of command.

“Let him go, now,” Siebenkæs begged, compassionating the prostrate sinner.

“In a moment; but don’t you put me in a fury, please,” said Leibgeber, letting fall the plucked wig, standing on it, and taking out his scissors and black paper, “I want to be quite calm while I clip out a likeness of the padded countenance of this portentous cotton-nightcap of a creature, because I shall take it away with me as a gage d’amour. I want to carry this ecce homunculus about with me half over the world, and say to everybody, ‘Hit it, bang away at it well; blessed is he who doth not depart this life till he hath thrashed Heimlicher Blasius of Kuhschnappel; I would have done it myself if I had not been far too strong.’

“I shan’t be able,” he went on, turning to Siebenkæs, and finishing a good portrait, “to give that sneak and sharper there an account by word of mouth of my success, for a whole year to come; but by that time the one or two little touches of abuse which I have just lightly applied to him will be covered by the statute of limitations, and we shall be as good friends as ever again.”

Here he unexpectedly requested Siebenkæs to stay by Saufinder—whom he had constituted into a corps of observation by a motion of his finger—as he was obliged to leave the room for a moment. On the last occasion of his being in Blaise’s grand drawing-room (where he displayed his magnificence before the Kuhschnappel world, great and small), he had noticed the paper-hangings there, and an exceedingly ingenious stove, in the form of the goddess of justice, Themis, who does, indeed, singe as frequently as she merely warms. And this time he had brought with him a camel’s-hair pencil, and a bottle of an ink made from cobalt dissolved in aquafortis, with a little muriatic acid dropped into it. Unlike the black cloth ink, which is visible at first and disappears afterwards, the sympathetic ink here spoken of is invisible at first, and only comes out a green colour on the paper when it is warmed. Leibgeber now wrote with his camel’s-hair pencil and this ink the following invisible notification on the paper which was closest to the stove, or Themis.

“The Goddess of Justice hereby protests in presence of this assembly against being thus set up in effigy, and warmed and cooled (if not absolutely hanged), at the pleasure of the Heimlicher von Blaise, who is long since condemned at her inner secret tribunal.

“Themis.”

Leibgeber came away, leaving the silent seed of this Priestley’s green composition behind him on the wall with the pleasing certainty that next winter, some evening when the drawing-room was nicely warmed by the goddess for a party, the whole dormant green crop would all of a sudden shoot lustily forth.

So he came back to the oratory again, finding Saufinder keeping up his appointed official contemplation, and his friend maintaining his observation of the dog. They then all took a most polite leave, and even begged the Heimlicher not to come into the street with them, as it mightn’t be so easy to keep Mordax from a bite or so there.

When they got to the street Leibgeber said to his friend, “Don’t pull such a long face about it—I shall keep flying backwards and forwards to you, of course. Come through the gate with me—I must get across the frontier of this country; let’s run, and get on to royal territory before six minutes are over our heads.”

When they had passed the gate, that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like ruins of it, the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood open and shining above the dark-green earth, and the ocean-calm of nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it), up above the world and down beneath it; the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail-pits, seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far reaching darkness. The fires of anger had suddenly gone out in the two friends’ hearts. Leibgeber said, in a voice pitched two octaves lower, “God be thanked! this writes a verse of peace round the storm bell within! the night seems to me to have muffled my alarum drum with her black robe, and softened it down to a funeral march. I am delighted to find myself growing a little sad after all that anger and shouting.”

“If it only hadn’t all been on my account, old Henry,” said Siebenkæs, “your humorous fury at that barefaced old sinner.”

“Though you are not so apt to shy your satire into people’s faces as I am,” said Leibgeber, “you would have been in a greater rage if you had been in my place. One can bear injustice to one’s self—particularly when one has as good a temper as I have—but not to a friend. And unluckily you are the martyr to my name to-day, and eyewitness and blood-witness into the bargain. Besides, I should tell you that, as a general rule, when once I am ridden by the devil of anger—or rather when I have got on to his back—I always spur the brute nearly to death, till he falls down, so that I mayn’t have to mount him again for the next three months. However, I have poured you out a nice basin of black broth, and left you sitting with the spoon in your hand.” Siebenkæs had been dreading for some time that he would say something about the 1200 gulden, those baptismal dues of his re-baptism, the discount of his name. He therefore said, as cheerfully and pleasantly as his heart, torn by this sudden, nocturnal parting, would let him, “My wife and I have plenty of supplies in our little bit of a fortress of Konigstein, and we can sow and reap there too. Heaven only grant that we may have many a hard nut to crack; they give a delicious flavour to the table-wine of our stale, flat, everyday life. I shall bring my action to-morrow.”

They both concealed their emotion at the approach of the moment of parting under the cloak of comic speeches. These two counterparts came to a column which had been erected by the Princess of —— on the spot where, on her return from England, she had met her sister coming from the Alps; and as this joyful souvenir of a meeting had a quite opposite significance to-night, Leibgeber said, “Now, right about face—march! Your wife is getting anxious—it’s past eleven o’clock. There, you see, we have reached your boundary mark, your frontier fortress, the gallows. I am off at once into Bayreuth and Saxony to cut my crop—other people’s faces, to wit, and sometimes my own fool’s face into the bargain. I shall most likely come and see you again, just for the fun of the thing, in a year and a day, when the verbal libels are pretty well out of date. By the by.” he added, hastily, “promise me on your word of honour to do me one little favour.”

Siebenkæs instantly did so. “Don’t send my deposit after me[^[19]]—a plaintiff has payments to make. So fare you well, dearest old man,” he blurted huskily out, and after a hurried kiss, ran quickly down the little hill with an air of assumed unconcern. His friend, bewildered and forsaken, looked after the runner, without uttering a syllable. When he got to the bottom of the hillock, the runner stopped, bent his head low towards the ground, and—loosened his garters.

“Couldn’t you have done that up here?” cried Siebenkæs, and went down to him, and said, “We’ll go as far as the gallows hill together.” The sand-bath and reverberating furnace of a noble anger made all their emotions warmer to-day, just as a hot climate gives strength to poisons and spices. As the first parting had caused their eyes to overflow, they had nothing more to keep in control but voice and language.

“Are you sure you feel quite well after being so much vexed?” said Siebenkæs. “If the death of domestic animals portends the death of the master of the house, as the superstition runs,” said Leibgeber, “I shall live to all eternity, for my menagerie[^[20]] of beasts is all alive and kicking.” At last they stopped at the market house, beside the place of execution. “Just up to the top,” said Siebenkæs, “no further.”

When they came to the top of this boundary-hill of so many an unhappy life—and when Siebenkæs looked down upon the green spotted stone altar where so many an innocent sacrifice had been offered up, and thought, in that dark minute, of the heavy blood drops of agony, the burning tears which women who had killed their children[^[21]] (and were themselves put to death by the state and their lovers) had let fall upon this their last and briefest rack of torture here in this field of blood—and as he gazed from this cloudbank of life out over the broad earth with the mists of night steaming up round its horizons and over all its streams—he took his friend’s hand, and, looking to the free starry heaven, said, “The mists of our life on earth must be resolved into stars, up there at last, as the mists of the milky way part into suns. Henry, don’t you yet believe in the soul’s immortality?”—“It will not do yet, I can not,” Leibgeber replied. “Blasius, now, hardly deserves to live once, let alone twice or several times. I sometimes can’t help feeling as if a little piece of the other world had been painted on to this, just to finish it off and make it complete, as I’ve sometimes seen subsidiary subjects introduced in fainter colours towards the edge of a picture, to make the principal subject stand out from the frame, and to give it unity of effect. But at this moment, human beings strike me as being like those crabs which priests used to fasten tapers to and set them crawling about churchyards, telling the people they were the souls of the departed. Just so do we, in a masquerade impersonation of immortal beings, crawl about over graves with our tapers of souls. Ten to one they go out at last.”

His friend fell on his heart, and said with vivid conviction, “We do not go out! Farewell a thousand times. We shall meet where there is no parting. By my soul! we do not go out. Farewell, farewell.”

And so they parted. Henry passed slowly and with drooping arms through the footpaths between the stubble-fields, raising neither hand nor eye, that he might give no sign of sorrow. But a deep grief fell on Siebenkæs, for men who rarely shed tears shed all the more when they do weep. So he went to his house and laid his weary melting heart to rest on his wife’s untroubled breast (there was not even a dream stirring it). But far on into the forecourt of the world of dreams did the thought of the days in store for Lenette attend him—and of his friend’s night journey under the stars, which he would be looking up at without any hope of ever being nearer to them; and it was chiefly for his friend that his tears flowed fast.

Oh ye two friends—thou who art out in the darkness there, and thou who art here at home! But wherefore should I be continually harping back upon the old emotion which you have once more awakened in me—the same which in old days used to penetrate and refresh me so when I read as a lad about the friendship of a Swift, an Arbuthnott and a Pope in their letters? Many another heart must have been fired and aroused as mine was at the contemplation of the touching, calm affection which the hearts of these men felt for one another; cold, sharp, and cutting to the outer world, in the inner land which was common to them they could work and beat for each other; like lofty palm trees, presenting long sharp spines towards the common world below them, but at their summits full of the precious palm-wine of strong friendship.

So, in their lesser degree, I think we may find something of a similar kind to like and to admire in our two friends, Leibgeber and Siebenkæs. We need not inquire very closely into the causes which brought about their friendship; for it is hate, not love, which needs to be explained and accounted for. The sources whence everything that is good wells forth from this universe upwards to God himself, are veiled by a night all thick with stars; but the stars are very far away.

These two men, while as yet in the fresh, green springtime of university life, at once saw straight through each other’s breasts into each other’s hearts, and they attracted each other with their opposite poles. What chiefly delighted Siebenkæs was Leibgeber’s firmness and power, and even his capability of anger, as well as his flights and laughter over every kind of sham grandeur, sham fine feeling, sham scholarship. Like the condor, he laid the eggs (of his act or of his pregnant saying) in no nest, but on the bare rock, preferring to live without a name, and consequently always taking some other than his own. On which account the poor’s advocate used to tell him, ten times over, the two following anecdotes, just to enjoy his irritation at them.

The first was, that a German professor in Dorpat, who was delivering a eulogistic address on the subject of the reigning grand duke Alexander, suddenly stopped in the middle of it, and gazed for a long time in silence on a bust of that potentate, saying at length, “The speechless heart has spoken.”

The second was that Klopstock sent finely got-up copies of his ‘Messiah’ to schoolporters, with the request that the most deserving among them might scatter spring-flowers on the grave of his own old teacher, Stubel, while softly pronouncing his (Klopstock’s) name. To which, if Leibgeber had anything to adduce on the subject, Siebenkæs would go on to add that the poet had called up four new porters to give them three readings apiece from his ‘Messiah,’ rewarding each with a gold medal provided by a friend. After telling him this he would look to see Leibgeber’s foaming and stamping at a person’s thus worshipping himself as a species of reliquary full of old fingers and bones.

What Leibgeber, on the other hand,—more like the Morlacks, who, as Towinson and Forlis tell us, though they have but one word to express both revenge and sanctification (osveta), do yet have their friends betrothed to them with a blessing at the altar—chiefly delighted in and loved about his satirical foster-brother was the diamond brooch which in his case pinned together poetry, kindly temper, and a stoicism which scorned this world’s absurdities. And lastly, each of them daily enjoyed the gratification of knowing that the other understood him completely and wonderfully, whether he were in jest or in earnest. But it is not every friend who meets with another of this stamp.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER II.

GOVERNMENT OF THE IMPERIAL MARKET BOROUGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.

I have omitted, all through two chapters, to state that the free imperial borough of Kuhschnappel (of which, it appears, there is a namesake in the Erzgebirge country) is the thirty-second of the Swabian towns which takes its seat on Swabia’s town-bench of thirty-one towns. Swabia may look upon herself as being a hotbed and forcing-house of imperial towns, these colonies, or hostelries, of the goddess of freedom in Germany, whom persons of position worship as their household goddess; and according to whose “election of grace” it is that poor sinners are called to salvation. I must now, in this place, accede to the universally expressed desire for an accurate sketch map of the Kuhschnappel Government; though few readers, save people such as Nikolai, Schlæzer and the like, can be expected to form an idea of the difficulty I have experienced, and the sum I have had to expend in postage, before getting hold of information somewhat more accurate than that which is generally current on the subject of Kuhschnappel. Indeed, imperial towns, like Swiss towns, always plaster over and stop up the combs where their honey is stored, as though their constitutions were stolen silver plate with the owner’s name still unobliterated—or as though the little bits of towns and territories were fortresses (which indeed they are as against their own inhabitants more than against their enemies), of which strangers are not allowed to take sketches.

The constitution of our noteworthy borough of Kuhschnappel seems to have been the original rough draft or sketch which Bern (a place at no great distance) has copied hers from, only with the pantograph on a larger scale. For Bern, like Kuhschnappel, has her Upper House, or supreme council, which decides upon peace and war, and has the power of life and death just as in Kuhschnappel, and consists of chief magistrates, treasurers, Venners, Heimlichers and counsellors, only that there are more of them in Bern than in Kuhschnappel. Further, Bern has her Lower House, consisting of presidents, deputies and pensioners, subsidiary to the Upper. The two Chambers of Appeal, those of Woods and Forests, Game Laws, and Reform, the Meat Tax and other commissions are clearly but large text copies of the Kuhschnappel outlines.

To speak the truth, however, I have drawn this comparison between these two places solely with the view of being comprehensible (perhaps at the same time agreeable) to the Swiss generally, and particularly to the people of Bern. For in reality, Kuhschnappel rejoices in a much more perfect and aristocratic constitution than Bern, such as was to be found in a measure in Ulm and Nürnberg, though the stormy weather of the revolution has rather kept them back than brought them forward. A short time since, Nürnberg and Ulm were as fortunate as Kuhschnappel is now, inasmuch as they were governed, not by the common, working classes, but by people of family only, so that no mere citizen could meddle with the matter in the least degree either in person or by deputy. Now, unfortunately, it appears to be the case in both towns that the cask of the state has had to be fresh tapped just about an inch or so above the thick dregs of the common herd, because what came from the tap nearer the top proved sour. However, it is impossible for me to go on until I have cleared out of the way a much too prevalent error respecting large towns.

The Behemoths and Condors among towns—Petersburg, London, Vienna—might, if they chose, establish universal equality of liberty and liberty of equality; very few statisticians have been struck by this idea, although it is so very clear. For a capital which it takes two hours and a quarter to go round is, as it were, an Ætna-crater of equivalent circumference for an entire country, and benefits the neighbourhood of it as the volcano does, not only by what it ejects (its eruptive matter), but by what it swallows up. It clears the country in the first place of villages, and next of country towns—which are primarily the outhouses and office-buildings of capital cities—inasmuch as it pushes itself outwards in all directions year by year, and gets grown over, fringed round, and walled about with the villages. London, we know, has converted the neighbouring villages into streets of itself; but in the lapse of centuries the long, constantly extending arms of all great towns must enfold not only the villages, but also the country towns, converting them into suburbs. Now, in this process, the roads, fields and meadows which lie between the giant city and the villages get covered over like a river-bed with a deposit of stone-paving; and consequently the operations of agriculture can no longer be carried on otherwise than in flower-pots in the windows. Where there is no agriculture, I cannot see what the agricultural population can become but unemployed idlers, such as no state allows within its boundaries; and, prevention being better than cure, the state will have to clear this agricultural population out of the way before it sinks into this condition of idling, either by means of letters inhibitory directed against the increase of population, or by extermination, or by ennobling them into soldiery and domestics. In a village which has undergone this process of being morticed into a town like a lump of rubble,—or converted into a stave of the great tun of Heidelberg in this manner—any country people that might be still to the fore, would be as ludicrous as useless; the coral cells of the villages must be cleared out before they attain the dignity of becoming reefs or atolls of a town.

When this is done, the hardest step towards equality has, no doubt, been taken; the people of the country towns, a class the most hostile of all classes, at heart, to equality—have next to be attacked and, if possible, exterminated by the great town; this, however, is more a matter of time than of good management. At the same time, what one or two residency-towns have accomplished in this direction, is a good beginning at all events. Could we attain to our ideal, however—could we live to see the day when the two classes who are the most formidable opponents of equality—the peasants, and the people of the smaller towns—should have disappeared; and when not only the agricultural races but the lower nobility, the small proprietors, should be extinct—ah! then the world would be in the blissful enjoyment of an equality of a nobler sort than that which obtained in France, where it was merely a plebeian one. There would be an absolute equality if pure nobility and collective humanity could rejoice in the possession of one patent of nobility, and of real authentic ancestors. In Paris, the revolution wrote (as people did in the most ancient times) without capital letters; but if my golden age came to pass, the writing would be as it was in somewhat later times than those just alluded to, all capital letters, not, as at present, with capitals sticking up like steeples among quantities of small letters. But though such a lofty style, such an ennoblement of humanity as this may be nothing but a beautiful dream, and though we must be content with the minor consolation of seeing, in towns, the middle classes restricted to a single street, as is now the case with the Jews; even that would be a clear gain to the intellectual portion of mankind in the eyes of anyone who considers what an accomplished, capable set of people the higher nobility are.

It is upon the smaller towns, however, that we can more confidently rely than upon the great residency-towns, for aid in bringing about the nobilisation of the collective human race, and this brings me back to Kuhschnappel. People really seem to forget that it is too much to expect that the four square versts or so which a residency-town occupies shall be able to dominate, swallow up, and convert into portions of itself, more than a thousand square miles of the surrounding country (just as the boa-constrictor swallows animals bigger than itself). London has not much above 600,000 inhabitants; what a miserably small force compared to the 5½ millions of all England, which that city has to contend with, and cut off the wings, and supplies of, alone and unassisted—to say nothing of Scotland and Ireland! This, however, does not apply to provincial towns; here the number of villages, villagers, and burghers which have to be coerced, starved, and put to rout, are in a fair proportion to the size of the town, the numbers of the aristocracy or governing classes, who have to execute the task, and work the smoothing plane which is to level the surface of humanity. Here there is little difficulty in precipitating the citizens (as if they were a kind of coarse dregs swimming in the clear fluid of nobility); and when this precipitation is not successfully accomplished, it is the aristocracy themselves who are to blame, in that they often show mercy in the wrong place, and look upon the Burgher-bank as a grassbank, the grass of which is, it is true, grown only to be sat upon and pressed down, but is kept always watered, in order that it may not wither from being so constantly sat upon. If there were to be nothing left but the noblest classes, the citizenic cinnamon-trees would be completely barked, by means of taxes and levyings of contributions—(which none but plebeian authors term “flaying” and “pulling the hide over the ears”),—and, the bark being off, the trees of course wither and die. At the same time, this process of aristocratization costs men. But in my opinion it would be cheaply purchased by the few thousands of people it would cost, seeing that the Americans, the Swiss, and the Dutch paid (so to speak) whole millions of men “cash down,” on the battlefield, as the price of a freedom of a much more restricted kind. The fault which is sometimes found with modern battle pictures, namely that they are overcrowded with people, can rarely be found with modern countries. We should rather notice the clever manner in which many German states have, by energetic treatment, determined their population, as morbid matter, in a downward direction (as good physicians are wont to do), namely, down to the United States of America, which are situated straight below them.

Kuhschnappel (to return to our subject) has the pull over hundreds of other towns. I admit, as Nicolai’s assertion, that of the 60,000 which Nürnberg contained there are but 30,000 left, and that is something; at the same time it takes fifty burghers, and more, to be equivalent to one aristocrat, which is much. Now I am in a position to show at any moment by reference to registers of deaths and baptisms, that the borough of Kuhschnappel contains almost as many aristocrats as burghers, which is all the more wonderful when we reflect that the former, on account of their appetites, find it a harder matter to live than the latter. What modern town, I ask, can point to so many free inhabitants? Were there not even in free Athens and Rome—in the West Indies there were of course—more slaves than free men, for which reason the latter did not dare to make the former wear any distinctive dress? And are there not in all towns more tenants than noble landlords, although the latter ought, one would think, to be in the majority, since peasants and burghers grow only by nature, while aristocrats are raised, both by nature, and by art (in the shape of princely and imperial chanceries). If this appendix were not a digression (and digressions are generally expected to be brief) I should proceed to show, at some length, that in several respects Kuhschnappel, if she does not surpass, is at least quite on a par with, many of the towns of Switzerland; for instance, in a good method of sharpening and lengthening the sword of justice, and, on the whole, in her manner of wielding a good, spiked, knotty mace—in the tax she levies on (ecclesiastical) corn, not that imported from abroad, but that of home growth, to exclude thought and other (in an ecclesiastical sense) rubbish of that sort—and even in her “green market,” or trade in young men. As regards the latter, the reason why the trade with France for young Kuhschnappelers to serve as porters and defenders of the Crown has hitherto been so flat is, that the Swiss have so terribly overdone the market with fine young fellows who go and stand in front of all the doors and (in war time) in front of all the cannons. Of course, were it not for this, there would be more doors than one with a Kuhschnappeler standing and saying, “Nobody at home.” (Indeed, here in my second edition, I can assert that Kuhschnappel continues to maintain its title of imperial market town, like a secondary electoral dignity, and keeps up its old protective laws against the import of ideas and the export of information, and its blood tithe; or young men tithe to France, just as Switzerland does, which is like the keeper of the castle of the Wartburg, who keeps constantly re-blackening the indelible mark of the ink which Luther threw at the devil.)

CHAPTER III.

LENETTE’S HONEYMOON—BOOK BREWING—SCHULRATH STIEFEL—MR. EVERARD—A DAY BEFORE THE FAIR—THE RED COW—ST. MICHAEL’S FAIR—THE BEGGARS’ OPERA—DIABOLICAL TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS, OR THE MANNIKIN OF FASHION—AUTUMN JOYS—A NEW LABYRINTH.

The world could not make a greater mistake than to suppose that our common hero would be to be seen on the Monday sitting in a mourning coach, in a mourning cloak, crape hat-band and scarf, and black shoe-buckles, figuring as chief mourner at the sham funeral of his happiness and his capital.

Heavens! how can the world make such an exceedingly bad shot as that? The advocate was not even in quarter mourning, let alone half; he was in as good spirits as if he had this third chapter before him, and were just beginning it, as I am.

The reason was, that he had drawn up an able plaint against his guardian, Blaise (enlivening it with sundry satirical touches, which nobody but himself understood), and laid it before the Inheritance Office. When we are in a difficulty, it is always so much gained if we can but do something or other. Let fortune bluster in our faces with ever so harsh and frosty an autumn wind—as long as it does not break the fore joint of our wing (as in the case of the swans), our very fluttering, though it may not transport us into a warmer climate, will at all events have the effect of warming us a little. From motives of kindness, Siebenkæs kept his wife in ignorance of the delay in the settling of his heritage accounts, as well as of the old story of the change of names; he thought there was very little likelihood of a struggling advocate’s wife ever having an opportunity of looking over a patrician’s shoulder into his family hand at cards.

And, indeed, what could a man who had made a sudden plunge from out his hermit’s holy-week of single blessedness, into the full honeymoon of double blessedness wish for besides? Not until now had he been able to hold his Lenette in both his arms rightly—hitherto his friend, always fluttering backwards and forwards in life, had been held fast with his left arm; but now, she was able to stretch herself out far more comfortably in the chambers of his heart. And the bashful wife did this as much as she dared. She confessed to him, albeit timidly, that she was almost glad not to have that boisterous Saufinder lying under the table and glaring out in that terrible way of his. Whether she experienced a similar relief at the absence of his wild master, she could not be brought to say. To the advocate she felt a good deal like a daughter, and her great tall father could never have enough of her quaint little ways. That, when he went out, she used to look after him as long as he was in sight, was nothing in comparison to the way in which she used to run out after him with a brush, when she noticed from the window that there was such a quantity of street paving sticking to his coat-tails that nothing would do but she must have him back again into the house, and brush his back as clean as if the Kuhschnappel municipality would charge him paving-tax if any of the mud were found on him. He would take hold of the brush and stop it, and kiss her, and say, “There’s a good deal inside as well; but nobody sees it there; when I come back we’ll set to work and scrub some of that away.”

Her maidenly obedience to his every wish and hint, her daughterly observance and fulfilment of them, were more than he looked for or required, indeed; but not too great for the love he bestowed in return. “Senate clerk’s daughter,” he said, “you mustn’t be too obedient to me; remember I’m not your father, a senate clerk, but a poor’s advocate who has married you and signs himself Siebenkæs, to the best of his belief.”

“My poor dear father,” she answered, “used often to compose and write down things too at home, himself, with his own hand, and then fair-copy them beautifully afterwards.” But he enjoyed these crooked answers which she used to make. And though, from sheer veneration of him, she never understood a single one of the jokes which he was always making about himself (for she gainsaid him when he satirically depreciated himself, and agreed with him completely if he ironically lauded himself), yet these mental provincialisms of hers pleased him not a little. She would use such words as “fleuch” for “fliehe,” “reuch” and “kreuch” for “riehe” and “kriehe;” religious antiquities out of Luther’s Bible, which were valuable and enjoyable contributions to her stock of idiosyncracies, and to the happiness of his honeymoon. One day when he took a particularly pretty cap which she had tried on with much satisfaction to each of her three cap-blocks, one after another (she would often gently kiss these cap-blocks), and putting it on her own little head before the looking-glass, said, “See how it looks on your own head; perhaps that’s as good a block as the others,” she laughed with immense delight, and said, “Now, you are always flattering one!”

Believe me, this naive failure of hers to see his joke so touched him that he made a secret vow never to make another of the kind, except in private to himself. But there was a greater honeymoon pleasure still. This was that, when there came a fast day, Lenette would on no account allow him to kiss her, when she came into the room (ready for church), her white and red bloom of youth shining out with threefold beauty from under her black lace head-dress, and the dark leafage of her dress.

“Worldly thoughts of that kind,” she said, “weren’t at all proper before service, when people had on their fast-day things; people must wait!”

“By heaven!” said Siebenkæs to himself, “may I stick a soup spoon five inches long and three broad through my lower lip, like a North American squaw, and go about with it there, if ever I begin spooning and kissing the pious soul again, when she has a black dress on, and the bells are ringing.” And though he wasn’t much of a churchgoer himself, he kept his word. See how we men behave in matrimonial life, young ladies!

From all which it will readily appear how perfectly happy the advocate was during his honeymoon, when Lenette, in the most delightful manner, did all those things for him which he used previously to have to do for himself in a most miserable fashion and against the grain, making by unwearied sweepings and brushings his dithyrambic chartreuse as clean and level and smooth as a billiard-table. Whole honey-trees full of cakes did she plant during the honeymoon; humming round him of a morning like a busy bee, carrying wax into her little hive (while he was going quietly on with his law-papers, building away at his juridical wasp’s nest), forming her cells, cleaning them out, ejecting foreign bodies, and mending chinks; he now and then looking out of his wasp’s nest at the pretty little figure in the tidiest of household dresses, at sight of which he would take his pen in his mouth, hold his hand out to her across the ink-bottle, and say, “Only wait till the afternoon comes and you’re sitting sewing—then, as I walk up and down, I shall pay you with kisses to your heart’s content.” But that none of my fair readers may be unhappy about the souring of the honey of this moon which the conduct of that disinheriting blackguard Blaise might bring about, let me just ask one question? Hadn’t Siebenkæs a whole silver mine and a coining mill, in the shape of seven law suits all going on, full of veins of rich ore? And hadn’t Leibgeber sent him a military treasury chest on four wheels of fortune, containing two spectacle dollars of Julius Duke of Brunswig, a Russian triple-dollar of 1679, a tail or queue ducat—a gnat or wasp dollar—five vicariat ducats, and a heap of Ephraimites? For he might melt down and volatilise this collection of coins without a moment’s hesitation, inasmuch as his friend had only pocketed them by way of a jest on the people who pay a hundred dollars for one. They two had all things corporeal and mental in common to an extent comprehensible by few. They had arrived at that point where there is no distinction visible between the giver and the receiver of a benefit, and they stepped across the chasms of life bound together, as the crystal-seekers in the Alps tie themselves to each other to prevent their falling into the ice clefts.

One Lady Day, towards evening, however, he hit upon an idea which will quite reassure all fair readers of his history who may be in a state of anxiety about him, and which made him happier than the receipt of the biggest basket of bread with little baskets of fruit in it would have done—or a hamper of wine. He had felt sure all along that he would hit upon an idea. Whenever he was in a difficulty of any kind, he always used to say, “Now, I wonder what I shall hit upon this time; for I shall hit upon something or other as sure as there are four chambers in my brain.” The delightful idea in question was, that he should do what I am doing at this moment—write a book; only his was to be a satirical one.[^[22]] A torrent of blood rushed through the opened sluices of his heart, right in amongst the wheels and mill-machinery of his ideas, and the whole of the mental mechanism rattled, whirred, and jingled in a moment—a peck or two of material for the book was ground on the spot.

I know of no greater mental tumult—hardly of any sweeter—which can arise in a young man’s being, than that which he experiences when he is walking up and down his room, and forming the daring resolution that he will take a book of blank paper and make it into a manuscript; indeed it is a point which might be argued whether Winckelmann, or Hannibal the great general, strode up and down their rooms at a greater pace when they respectively formed the (equally daring) resolution that they would go to Rome. Siebenkæs, having made up his mind to write a ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers,’ was forced to run out of the house, and three times round the market-place, just to fix his fluttering, rushing ideas into their proper grooves again by the process of tiring his legs. He came back wearied by the glow within him—looked to see if there was enough white paper in the house for his manuscript—and running up to his Lenette, who was tranquilly working away at a cap, gave her a kiss before she could well take the needle out of her mouth—last thorn upon the rose-tree! During the kiss she quietly gave a finishing stitch to the border of the cap (squinting down at it the best way she could without moving her head).

“Rejoice with me!” he cried, “come and dance about with me! to-morrow I’m going to begin a work, a book! Roast the calf’s head to-night, though it be a breach of our ten commandments.” For he and she, on the Wednesday before, had formed themselves into a committee on food regulations, and, of the Thirty-nine articles of domestic economy, which had then been passed and subscribed to, one was that, Brahminlike, they were to do without meat at supper.

But he had the greatest difficulty in getting her to understand how it was that he made out that he would be able to procure her another calf’s head with a single sheet of the ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers,’ and that he was perfectly justified in issuing a dispensation from that evening’s fast; for like the common herd of mankind, or like the printers, Lenette thought that a written book was paid for at the same rate as a printed one, and that the compositor got rather more than the author. She had never in her life had the slightest idea of the enormous sums which authors are paid nowadays; she was like Racine’s wife, who did not know what a line of poetry or a tragedy was, although she kept house upon them. For my part, however, I should never lead to the altar, or into my home as my wife, any woman who wasn’t capable of at least completing any sentence which death should knock me over with his hour-glass in the middle of,—or who wouldn’t be unspeakably delighted when I read to her learned Göttingen gazettes, or universal German magazines, in which I was bepraised, more than I deserved perhaps.

The rapture of authorship had set all Siebenkæs’s blood-globules into such a flow, and all his ideas into such a whirlwind this whole evening that, in the condition of vividness of fueling and fancy in which he was (a condition which in him often assumed the appearance of temper), he would instantly have flown out and exploded like so much fulminating gold at everything of a slow moving kind which he came across—such as the servant girl’s heavy dawdling step, or the species of dropsy with which her utterance was afflicted;—but that he at once laid hold on a precious sedative powder for the over-excitement caused by happiness, and took a dose of it. It is easier to communicate an impetus and a rapid flow to the slow-gliding blood of a heavy, sorrowful heart, than to moderate and restrain the billowy, surging, foaming current which rushes through the veins in happiness; but he could always calm himself, even in the wildest joy, by the thought of the inexhaustible Hand which bestowed it, and that gentle tenderness of heart wherewith our eyes are drooped to earth as we remember the invisible, eternal Benefactor of all hearts. At such a time the heart, softened by thankfulness and by joyful tears, will speak its gratitude by at least being kindlier towards all mankind, if in no other way. That fierce, untamed delight, which is what Nemesis avenges, can best be kept within due bounds by this sense of gratitude; and those who have died of joy would either not have died at all, or would have died of a better and lovelier joy, if their hearts had first been softened by a grateful heavenward gaze.

His first and best thanksgiving for the new, smooth, beautiful banks, between which his life-stream had now been led, took the form of a zealous and careful drawing up of a defence which he had to prepare in the case of a girl charged with child-murder, to save her from torture on the rack. The state-physician of the borough had condemned her to the “trial by the lungs,” a neither more nor less suitable punishment than the “trial by water” (which used to be inflicted on witches).

Calm spring-days of matrimony, peaceful and undisturbed, laid down their carpet of flowers for the feet of these two to tread upon. Only there sometimes appeared under the window, when Lenette was stretching herself and her white arm out of a morning, and slowly accomplishing the fastening back of the outside shutters, a gentleman in flesh-coloured silk.

“I really feel quite ashamed to stretch,” she said; “there’s a gentleman always standing in the street, and he takes off his hat, and notes one down just as if he were the meat appraiser.”

The Schulrath Stiefel kept, on the school Saturday holidays, the solemn promise he had made on the wedding-day to come and see them often, and at all events to be sure and come on the Saturdays. I think I shall call him Peltzstiefel (Furboots) as a pleasing variety for the ear—seeing that the whole town gave him that name on account of the gray miniver, faced with hareskin, which he wore on his legs by way of a portable wood-economising stove. Well, Peltzstiefel, the moment he came in at the door, fastened joy-flowers together into a nosegay, and stuck them into the advocate’s button-bole, by appointing him on the spot his collaborateur on the ‘Kuhschnappel Indicator, Heavenly Messenger, and School Programme Review’—a work which ought to be better known, so that the works recommended by it might be so too. This newspaper engagement of Siebenkæs is a great pleasure to me; it will at any rate bring my hero in sixpence or so towards a supper now and then. The Schulrath, who was editor of this paper, had a high sense of the power and responsibility of his post; but Siebenkæs had now risen to the dignity of an author—the only being who in his eyes was superior even to a reviewer—for Lenette had told him on the way to church that her husband was going to have a great thick book printed. The Schulrath considered the ‘Salzburg Literary Gazette’ of the period the apocryphal, and the ‘Jena Literary Gazette’ the canonical scriptures: the single voice of one reviewer was, for his ears, multiplied by the echo in the critical judgment hall into a thousand voices. His deluded imagination multiplied the head of one single reviewer into several Lernæan heads, as it was believed of old that the devil used to surround the heads of sinners with delusive false heads, that the executioner might miss his stroke at them.

The fact that a reviewer writes anonymously gives to a single individual’s opinions the weight and authority they would possess, if arrived at by a whole council; but then if his name were put at the end, for instance, “X.Y.Z., Student of Divinity,” instead of “New Universal German Library,” it would weaken the effect of the divinity student’s learned laying down of the law to too great an extent. The Schulrath paid court to my hero on account of his satirical turn; for he himself, a very lamb in common life, transformed himself into a wehrwolf in a review article; which is frequently the case with good-tempered men when they write, particularly on humaniora and such like subjects. As indeed, peaceful shepherd races (according to Gibbon) are fond of making war, and of beginning it, or just as the Idyllic painter, Gessner, was himself a biting caricaturist.

And our hero for his part afforded Stiefel a great pleasure this evening, as well as holding out to him the prospect of many more such, when he took from Leibgeber’s collection of coins a gnat or wasp dollar, and gave it to him, not as a douceur for his appointment to the critical wasp’s nest, but that he might turn it into small change. The Schulrath who, being himself the zealous “Silberdiener” (master of the plate and jewels) of a dollar-cabinet of his own, would have been delighted if money had existed solely for the sake of cabinets—(meaning, however, numismatic, not political, cabinets)—sparkled and blushed delighted over the dollar, and declared to the advocate (who only wanted the absolute value of it, not the coin-fancier’s price) that he considered this a piece of true friendship. “No,” answered Siebenkæs, “the only piece of true friendship about the matter is Leibgeber giving me the dollar.” “But I’ll give you certainly three dollars for it, if you like to ask it,” said Stiefel. Lenette, delighted at Stiefel’s delight, and at his kindly feeling, and secretly giving her husband a push as an admonition not to give way, here struck in with an amount of determination which astonishes me, “But my husband’s not going to do anything of the kind, I assure you; a dollar’s a dollar.” “But,” said Siebenkæs, “I ought rather to ask you only a third of the price, if I’m going to hand over my coins to you one at a time in this way.” Ye dear souls! If people’s “yeses” in this world were only always such as your “buts.”

Stiefel, confirmed bachelor though he was, wasn’t going to let himself be found wanting, on such a delightful occasion as this, at all events, in proper politeness towards the fair sex, least of all towards a woman whom he had begun to be so fond of, even when he was bringing her home to be married, and whom he liked twice as much now that she was the wife of such a dear friend, and was such a dear friend herself too. He therefore adroitly led her to join in the conversation (which had previously been too deep and scholarly for her) by using the three cap-blocks as stepping-stones over to the journal of fashions; only he slid back again sooner than he might have done to a more ancient journal of fashions, that of Rubenius on the ‘Costume of the ancient Greeks and Romans.’ He said he should be happy to lend her his sermons every Sunday, as advocates don’t deal in theology much. And when she was looking on the floor at her feet for the snuffers which had fallen, he held the candle down that she might see.

The next Sunday was an important day for the house (or rather rooms) of Siebenkæs, for it introduced thereto a grander character than any who have appeared hitherto, namely the Venner (Finance Councillor)—Mr. Everard Rosa von Meyern, a young member of the aristocracy, who went daily in and out at Heimlicher von Blaise’s to “learn the routine of official business;” he was also engaged to be married to a poor niece of the Heimlicher’s, who was being brought up and educated for his heart in another part of Germany.

Thus the Venner was a character of consequence in the borough of Kuhschnappel as well as in our ‘Thorn-piece,’ and this in every political point of view. In a corporeal point of view he was much less so. His body was stuck through his flowered garments much like a piece of stick through a village nosegay; under the shining wing-covers of his waistcoat (in itself a perfect animal-picture)[^[23]] there pulsated a thorax, perpendicular, if not absolutely concave, and his legs had, all told, about the same amount of calf as those wooden ones which stocking-makers put into their windows as an advertisement.

The Venner gave the advocate to understand, in a cold and politely rude manner, that he had merely come to relieve him from the task of defending the case of child-murder, as he had so much to attend to besides. But Siebenkæs saw through this pretence with great ease. It was a well-known circumstance that the girl accused of this crime had adopted as the father of her child (now flown, away above this earth) a certain commercial traveller, whose name neither she nor the documents connected with her case could mention; but that the real father—who, like a young author, was bashful about putting his name to his pièce fugitive—was no other than the emaciated Venner, Everard Rosa von Meyern himself. There are certain things which a whole town will determine and make up its mind to ignore; and one of these was Rosa’s authorship. Heimlicher von Blaise knew that Siebenkæs was aware of it, however, and feared that he might, out of revenge for the affair of the inheritance, purposely make a poor defence of the girl, that the shame and disgrace of her end might fall upon his relative, Meyern’s shoulders. What a terrible, mean suspicion!

And yet the purest minds are sometimes driven to entertain such suspicions. Fortunately Siebenkæs had already got the poor mother’s lightning-conductor all ready forged and set up. When he showed it to this false bridegroom of the supposed child-murderess, the latter immediately declared that she could not have found an abler guardian saint among all the advocates in the town; to which author and reader can both add “nor one who should be actuated by worthier motives,” as we know he did it as a thank-offering to Heaven for the first idea of the ‘Devil’s Papers.’

At this juncture, the advocate’s wife came suddenly back from the adjoining bookbinder’s room, where she had been paying a flying visit. The Venner sprang to meet her at the threshold with a degree of politeness which couldn’t have been carried further, inasmuch as she had to open the door before he could reach her. He took her hand, which, in her respect and awe of him, she half permitted, and kissed it stooping, but twisted his eyes up to her face, and said:

“Meddem! I have had this beautiful hand in mine for several days.”

It now appeared, from what he said, that he was the identical flesh-coloured gentleman who had stolen her hand with his drawing-pen when she had had it out of the window; because he had been anxious to get a pretty Dolce’s hand for a three-quarter portrait of the young lady he was engaged to, and hadn’t known what to do; her head he was doing from memory. He then took off his gloves, in which alone he had dared as yet to touch her (as many of the early Christians used only to touch the Eucharist in gloves from reverence therefor), displaying the fires of his rings and the snow of his skin. To preserve the whiteness of the latter from the sun, he hardly ever took his gloves off, except in winter when the sun has scarcely power to burn.

The Kuhschnappel aristocracy, particularly its younger members, give a willing obedience to the commandment which Christ gave to His apostles, to “greet no man by the way,” and the Venner observed the required degree of incivility towards the husband, though not by any means to the wife, towards whom his condescension was infinite. An inborn characteristic of Siebenkæs’s satirical disposition was a fault which he had of being too polite and kindly with the lower classes, and too forward and aggressive with the upper. He had not as yet sufficient knowledge of the world to enable him to determine the precise angle at which his back should bend before the various great ones of the place, wherefore he preferred to go about bolt upright, though he did so against the promptings of his kind heart. An additional cause was, that the profession to which he belonged being of a belligerent nature, has a tendency to embolden those who belong to it; an advocate has the advantage of never requiring to employ one himself, and consequently he is often inclined to treat even the grandest folks with some amount of coolness, unless they happen to be judges or clients, at the disposal of both of which classes of society his best services are at all times ready to be placed. Notwithstanding which, it generally happened that, in Siebenkæs’s kindly feeling to all mankind, his moveable bridge got shoved down so low under his tightened strings that the notes given out by them became quite low and soft. On the present occasion, however, it was much more difficult to be polite to the Venner (whose designs as regarded Lenette he was compelled to see) than to be rude to him.

Moreover, he had an inborn detestation for dressy men although—just, the contrary feeling for dressy women—so that he would often sit and stare for a long time at the little Fugel-mannikins of dress in the fashion journals, just to get properly angry at them; and he would assure the Kuhschnappelers that there was nobody whom he should so delight in playing practical jokes upon as on such a mannikin—yea, in insulting him, or even doing him an injury (to the extent of a good cudgelling). Also it had always been a source of delight to him that Socrates and Cato walked barefoot about in the market-place; going bareheaded, on the other hand (chapeau bas), he did not like half so much.

But, ere he could utter himself otherwise than by making faces, the wooden-head of a Venner stroked his sprouting beard, and in a distant manner graciously offered himself to the advocate in the capacity of cardinal protector or mediator in the Blaise inheritance business; this he did, of course, partly to blind the advocate’s eyes, and partly to impress upon him how immeasurably inferior was his station. The latter, however, shuddering at the idea of taking a gnome of this kind for paraclete and household angel, said to him (but in Latin)—

“In the first place I must insist that my wife shall not hear a syllable about that insignificant potato quarrel. And moreover, in any legal question I scorn and despise anybody’s assistance but a legal friend’s, and in this instance I am my own legal friend. I fill an official position here in Kuhschnappel; it is true, the official position by no means fills me.” The latter play upon words he expressed by means of a Latin one, which displayed such an unusual amount of linguistic ability, that I should almost like to quote it here. The Venner, however, who could neither construe the pun nor the rest of the speech with the ease with which we have read it here, answered at once (so as to escape without exposing his ignorance) in the same language, “Imo, immo,” which he meant for yes. Firmian then went on, in German, saying, “Guardian and ward, intimate as their connection should be, in this case came into contact to an extent almost too great to be pleasant; although, no doubt, there have been cases before where one cousin has cozened another:[^[24]] however, the very members of ecclesiastical councils have come to fisticuffs before now, e. g. at Ephesus in the fifteenth century. Indeed, the Abbot Barsumas and Dioscurus, Bishop of Alexandria, men of position, pummelled the good Flavian on that very occasion till he was as dead as a herring.[^[25]] And this was on a Sunday too, a day on which, in these absurd old times, a sacred truce was put to quarrels and differences of every description; though now, Sundays and feast-days are the very days when the peace is broken; the public-house bells and the tinkling of the glasses ring the truce out, and people pummel each other, so that the law gets her finger into the pie. In old days, people multiplied the number of saints’ days for the sake of stopping fights, but the fact is that everybody connected with the legal profession, Herr von Meyern (who must have something to live upon), ought to petition that a peaceable working-day or two might be abolished now and then, so that the number of rows might be increased, and with them the fines and the fees in like ratio. Yet who thinks of such a thing, Venner?”

He was quite safe in spouting the greater part of this before Lenette; she had long been accustomed to understanding only a half, a fourth, or an eighth part of what he said; as for the whole Venner, she gave herself no concern about him. When Meyern had taken his departure with frigid politeness, Siebenkæs, with the view of helping to advance him in his wife’s good opinion, extolled his whole and undivided love for the entire female sex (though engaged to be married), and more particularly his attachment to that preliminary bride of his, who was now in the condemned cell of the prison; this, however, rather seemed to have the effect of lowering him in her good opinion.

“Thou good, kind soul, may you always be as faithful to yourself and to me!” said he, taking her to his heart. But she didn’t know that she had been faithful, and said, “to whom should I be unfaithful?”

From this day onwards to Michaelmas Day, which was the day of the borough fair, fortune seems to have led our pathway, I mean the reader’s and mine, through no very special flower-beds to speak of, but merely along the smooth green turf of an English lawn, one would suppose on purpose that the fair on Michaelmas Day may suddenly arise upon our view as some shining, dazzling town starts up out of a valley. Very little did occur until then; at least, my pen, which only considers itself bound to record incidents of some importance, is not very willing to be troubled to mention that the Venner Meyern dropped in pretty often at the bookbinder’s (who lived under the same roof with the Siebenkæses)—he merely came to see whether the ‘Liaisons Dangereuses’ were bound yet.

But that Michaelmas! Truly the world shall remember it. And in fact the very eve of it was a time of such a splendid and exquisite quality that we may venture to give the world some account of it.

Let the world read the account of this eve of preparation at all events, and then give its vote.

On this eve of the fair all Kuhschnappel (as all other places are at such a time) was turned into a workhouse and house of industry for women; you couldn’t have found a woman in the whole town either sitting down, or at peace, or properly dressed. Girls the most given to reading opened no books but needle-books to take needles out, and the only leaves they turned over were paste ones to be put on pies. Scarcely a woman took any dinner; the Michaelmas cakes and the coming enjoyment of them were the sole mainspring of the feminine machinery.

On these occasions women may be said to hold their exhibitions of pictures, the cakes being the altar-pieces. Everyone nibbles at and minutely inspects these baked escutcheons of her neighbour’s nobility; and each has, as it were, her cake attached to her, as a medal is, or the lead tickets on bales of cloth, to indicate her value. They scarcely eat or drink anything, it is true, thick coffee being their consecrated sacrament wine, and thin transparent pastry their wafers; only the latter (in their friend’s and hostess’s houses) tastes best, and is eaten almost with fondness when it has turned out hard and stony and shot and dagger proof—or is burnt to a cinder—or, in short, is wretched from some cause or other; they cheerfully acknowledge all the failures of their dearest friends, and try to comfort them by taking them to their own houses and treating them to something of a very different kind.

As for our Lenette, she, my dear lady reader, has always been a baker of such a sort that male connoisseurs have preferred her crust, and female connoisseurs her crum, both classes maintaining that no one but she (and yourself, dearest) could bake anything like either. The kitchen fire was this salamander’s second element, for the first and native element of this dear nixie was water. To be scouring with sand, and squattering and splattering in it, in a great establishment like Siebenkæs’s (who had devoted all Leibgeber’s Ephraimites to the keeping of this feast), was quite her vocation. No kiss could be applied to her glowing face on such a day—and indeed she had her hands pretty full, for at ten o’clock the butcher came bringing more work with him.

The world will be glad (I’m perfectly certain in my own mind) if I just give them a very short account of this business—who could have done it better, for that matter? The facts of it were these: at the beginning of summer the four fellow lodgers had clubbed together and bought a cow in poor condition which they had then put up to fatten. The bookbinder, the cobbler, the poor’s advocate and the hairdresser—between whom and his tenants there was this distinction, that they owed their rent to him, whereas he owed his to his creditors—caused to be prepaid and drawn up by a skilful hand (which was attached to the arm of Siebenkæs) an authentic instrument (here KOLBE the word-purist will snarl at poor innocent me in his usual manner for employing foreign words in a document based on the Roman law) relative to the life and death of the cow; in which instrument the four contracting parties aforesaid—who all stood attentively round the document, he who was sitting and drawing it excepted—bound and engaged themselves in manner following, that is to say, that—

1stly. Each of the four parties interested, as aforesaid, in the said cow might and should have the privilege of milking her alternately.

2ndly. That this Cooking or Fattening Society might and should defray from a common treasury chest the price of said cow, the cost of the carriage of implements and provisions, and maintenance generally of the same; and

3rdly. That the allied powers as aforesaid should not only on the day before Michaelmas, the 28th September, 1785, slaughter the said cow, but further that each quarter of the same should then and there be further divided into four quarters, conformably to the lex agraria, for partition among the said parties to the said contract.

Siebenkæs prepared four certified copies of this treaty, one for each; he never wrote anything with graver pleasure. All that now remained to be performed of the contract by the house association of our four evangelists, who had collectively adopted as their armorial crest or emblematic animal, one single joint-stock beast, namely, the female of that of Saint Luke—was the third article of it.

However, I know the learned classes are panting for my fair, so I shall only dash down a hurried sketch of my Man-and-Animal piece (Kolbe of course goes on taking me to task).

That Septembriseur, the butcher, did his part of the business well, though it was at the close of Fructidor—the four messmates looking on throughout the operation, as also did old Sabine, who did a good deal, and got something for it. The quadruple alliance regaled itself on the slain animal at a general picnic, to which each contributed something in order that the butcher might be included gratis; and it is undeniable that one member of the league, whom I shall name hereafter, attended this picnic in a frame of mind and in a costume barely serious enough for the occasion. The slaughter confederation then set to working its division sum, according to the number of its members, and the golden calf round which their dance was executed was cut, up with the appropriate heraldic cuts. Then the whole thing was over. I think I can say nothing more laudatory of the manner in which the whole process of zootomic division was carried out than what Siebenkæs, an interested party, said himself, viz., “It’s to be wished that the twelve tribes of Israel, as well as, in later times, the Roman empire, had been divided into as many and as fair divisions as our cow and Poland have been.”

I shall be doing ample justice to the cow’s embonpoint if I merely mention that Fecht the cobbler uttered a panegyric which commenced with the most lively and vigorous oaths, and the statement that she was an (adjective) bag of skin and bones, and ended with an assurance, uttered in mild and pious accents that Heaven had indeed favoured the poor beast, and “blessed us unworthy sinners above measure.” A frolicsome cult by nature, he had had the heavy coach-harness of pietism put on to him, and was consequently obliged to keep softening down the “strong language” which came naturally to him into the pious sighs appropriate to his “converted state.” And it was to the frame of mind and the costume of this very FECHT that I made allusion above as being barely suitable to the occasion, for I’m sorry to say he had no breeches on him the whole day of this great slaughter, but ran up and down the slaughter-house in a white frieze frock of his wife’s, having a strange general effect of looking something like his own better half. However, the members of the association didn’t take any offence; he couldn’t help it, because while he was going about got up in this Amazon’s demi-negligée, and presenting this hermaphrodite appearance, his own black-leather leg-cases were in the dye pot, being prepared for a reissue.

The poor’s advocate had begged Lenette (about a quarter past four in the afternoon) not to go on working herself to death, and never to mind bothering about any supper, as he was going to be miserly for once, save himself a supper tonight, and sup upon eighteen penn’orth of pastry: but the busy soul kept running about brushing and sweeping, and by six o’clock they were both lying resting in the leather arms of—a big easy chair (for he had no flesh and she no bones), and looking around them with that expression of tranquil happiness which you may see in children while eating, at the room in its state of mathematical order, at the way in which everything in it was shining, at the pastry new-moon-crescents in their hands, and at the liquid burnished gold (or rather foilgold[^[26]]) of the setting sun creeping up and up upon the gleaming tin dishes. There they rested and reposed like cradled children, with the screeching, clattering, twelve herculean labours of the rest of the people of the house going on all round them; and the clearness of the sky and the newly cleaned windows added a full half-hour to the length of the day; the bell-hammer, or tuning-hammer of the curfew bell gently let down the pitch of their melodious wishes till they lapsed into dreams.

At ten o’clock they woke up and went to bed...!

I quite enjoy this little starry night picture myself; though my head has reflected it all glimmery and out of focus, as the gilt hemisphere of my watch does the evening sun when I hold it up to it. Evening is the time when we weary, hunted men long to be at rest; it is for the evening of the day, for the evening of the year (autumn), and for the evening of life, that we lay up our hard-earned harvests, and with such eager hopes! But hast thou never seen in fields, when the crops were gathered, an image and emblem of thyself—I mean the autumn daisy, the flower of harvest; she delays her blossom till the summer is past and gone, the winter snows cover her before her fruit appears, and it is not till the—coming spring that that fruit is ripe!

But see how the roaring, dashing surges of the fair-day morning come beating upon our hero’s bedposts! He comes into the white, shining room, which Lenette had stolen out of bed like a thief before midnight to wash while he was in his first sleep, and had sanded all over like an Arabia; in which manner she had her own way while he had his. On a fair-day morning I recommend everybody to open the window and lean out, as Siebenkæs did, to watch the rapid erection and hiring of the wooden booths in the market-place, and the falling of the first drops of the coming deluge of people, only let the reader observe that it wasn’t by my advice that my hero, in the very arrogance of his wealth (for there were samples of every kind of pastry which the house contained on a table behind him), called down to many of the little green aristocratic caterpillars whom he saw moving along in the street with even greater arrogance than his own, and whose natural history he felt inclined to learn by a look at their faces.

“I say, sir, will you just be good enough to look at that house, that one there—do you notice anything particular?”

If the caterpillar lifted up its physiognomy, he could peruse and study it at his ease,—which was of course his object.

“You don’t notice anything particular?” he would ask.

When the insect shook its head, he concurred with it, and did the same up at the window, saying:

“No, of course not! I’ve been looking at it for the last twelve months myself, and can’t see anything particular about it; but I didn’t choose to believe my own eyes.”

Giddypated Firmian! Your seething foam of pleasure may soon drop down and disappear—as it did that Saturday when the cards were left. As yet, however, his little drop of must which he has squeezed out of the forenoon hours was foaming and sparkling briskly. The landlord moved at a gallop, casting (with his powder-sowing machine) seed into a fruitful soil. The bookbinder conveyed his goods (consisting partly of empty manuscript books, partly of still emptier song books, partly of “novelties,” in almanacs) to the fair by land-carriage in a wheelbarrow, which he had to make two journeys with in going, but only one in returning in the evening, because then he had got rid of his almanacs to purchasers and to sellers (almanacs are the greatest of all novelties, or pieces of news—for there is nothing in all the long course of time so new as the new year). Old Sabel had set up her East India house, her fruit garner, and her cabinet of tin rings at the town gate; she wouldn’t have let that warehouse of hers go to her own brother at a lower figure than half-a-sovereign. The cobbler put a stitch in no shoe on this St. Michael’s Day except his wife’s.

Suck away, my hero, at your nice bit of raffinade sugar of life, and empty your forenoon sweetstuff spoon, not troubling your head about the devil and his grandmother, although the pair of them should be thinking (after the nature of them) about getting a bitter potion, even a poison cup, made ready and handing it to you.

But his greatest enjoyment is still to come, to wit, the numberless beggar people. I will describe this enjoyment, and so distribute it.

A fair is the high mass which the beggars of all ranks and classes attend; when it is still a day or two off, all the footsoles that have nothing to walk upon but compassionate hearts, are converging towards the spot like so many radii, but on the morning of the fair-day itself the whole annual congress of beggardom and the column of cripples are fairly on the march. Anyone who has seen Fŭrth, or been in Elwangen during P. Gassner’s government, may cut these few leaves out of his copy; but no one else has any idea of it till I proceed and lead him in at the town-gate of Kuhschnappel.

The street choral service and the vocal serenades now commence. The blind sing like blinded singing-birds—better, but louder; the lame walk; the poor preach the gospel themselves; the deaf and dumb make a terrible noise, and ring in the feast with little bells—everybody sings his own tune in the middle of everybody else’s—a paternoster is clattering at the door of every house, and in the rooms inside nobody can hear himself swear. Whole cabinets of small coppers are lavished on one hand, pocketed on the other. The one-legged soldiery spice their ejaculatory prayers with curses, and blaspheme horribly, because people don’t give them enough—in brief, the borough which had made up its mind for a day’s enjoyment, is invaded and almost taken by storm by the rabble of beggars.

And now the maimed and the diseased begin to appear. Whoever has a wooden jury-leg under him, sets it and his long third leg and fellow-labourer the crutch, in motion towards Kuhschnappel, and drives and plants his sharp-pointed timber toe into moist earth there in the vicinity of the town-gate, in hopes of its thriving and bearing fruit. Whosoever has no arms or hands left, stretches both out for an alms. Those to whom Heaven has entrusted the beggars’ talent, disease, above all paralysis, the beggars’ vapeurs—trades with his talent, and the body appertaining to it, levying contributions with it on the whole and the sound. People who might stand as frontispieces to works on surgery and medicine, quite as appropriately as at city gates, take up their position near the latter and announce what they lack, which is, first and foremost, other people’s cash. There are plenty of legs, noses, and arms in Kuhschnappel, but a great many more people. There is one most extraordinary fellow—(to be admired at a distance, though impossible to be equalled—looked upon with envy, though indeed only by such blotting-paper souls as can never see supreme excellence without longing to possess it); there’s only half of him there, because the other half’s in his grave already, everything you could call legs having been shot clean away; and these shots have placed him in a position at once to arrogate and assume to himself the primacy and generalship-in-chief of the cripples, and be drawn about on a triumphal car as a kind of demigod, whose soul, in place of a corporeal garment, has on merely a sort of cape and short doublet. “A soldier,” said Siebenkæs, “who is still afflicted with one leg, and who on that ground expostulates with fate, inquiring of her, ‘Why am I not shot to pieces like that cripple, so that I might make as much in the day as he does?’ seems to forget that on the other side of the question there are thousands of other warriors besides himself who haven’t even one wooden leg (let alone more), but are totally unprovided with even that fire- and begging-certificate; moreover, that however many of his limbs he might have been relieved of by bullets, he might still keep on asking, ‘Why not more?’”

Siebenkæs was merry over the poor because they are merry over themselves; and he never would kick up a politico-economical row about their occasionally tippling and guzzling a little too much,—when, for instance, a whole lazarette-wagon, or ambulance-load of them, halting at some shepherd’s hut, they get down, and go in, and their plasters, their martyrs’ crowns, their spiked girdles and hair-shirts come off, leaving nothing but a brisk human being who has left off sighing just for a minute; or—since what everybody works for is, not merely to live, but to live a little better now and then—when the beggar too has something a little better than his everyday fare, and when the cripple pulls the goddess of joy into his boarded dancing-barn to dance with him as his partner, and her hot mask falls off in the waltz (as for our ball-rooms, it never falls off in them).

About 11 o’clock, the devil, as I have half hinted already, dropped a handful of blue-bottle flies into Firmian’s wedding soup—to wit, Herr Rosa von Meyern, who graciously intimated his aristocratic intention of coming to call that afternoon, “because there was such a good view of the market-place.” People of impecunious gentility, who can’t issue orders in any houses but their own, construct in their own, with much ease, loopholes whence they can fire upon the enemy who makes his attack from—within. The advocate had a piece of rudeness towards the Venner to put into either scale of his balance of justice, so as to determine which was the least of the two. The one was, to let him be told he might stay where he was; the other, to let him in, and then behave just as though the noodle were up in the moon. Siebenkæs chose the latter as the smaller.

Women, good souls, have always to carry and hold up the Jacob’s ladder by which the male sex mount into the blue æther and into the evening-red; this call of the Venner came as an extra freight loaded on to Lenette’s two burden-poles of arms. The laving of all moveable property, and the aspersion of all immoveable, recommenced. Meyern, the false lover of the poor child-murderess, Lenette detested with all her heart; at the same time, all her polishing machinery was at once set agoing on the room, indeed, I think women dress themselves more and with greater pains for their lady-enemies than for their lady-friends.

The advocate went up and down, all behung with long chains of ratiocination, like a ghost, and would fain have succeeded in imbuing her with the idea that she shouldn’t give herself the slightest bother of any kind about the nincompoop. “It was no good,” she said, “what would he think of me?” It was not until having eliminated from the room as a piece of crudity his old ink-bottle, into which he had only that minute put ink-powder to dissolve and make ink for the ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers,’ she was about to lay hands on that holy ark, his writing-table—that the head of the house ramped up—on his hind legs, pointing with his fore paw to the line of demarcation.

Rosa appeared! Nobody who had just a little soft place in his heart could really have cursed this youngster, or beaten him into a jelly; one rather got to feel a kind of a liking for him, between his pranks. He had white hair on his head and on his chin, and was soft all over; and had stuff like milk instead of blood in his veins, like the insects, just as poisonous plants have generally white milky juice. He was of a very forgiving nature, especially towards women, and often shed more tears himself in an evening at the theatre than he had caused many whom he had ruined to let fall. His heart was really not made of stone, or lapis infernalis, and if he prayed for a certain time, he grew pious during the process and sought out the most time-honoured of religious formularies to give in his adhesion to them then and there. Thunder was to him a watchman’s rattle, arousing him from the sleep of sin. He loved to take the needy by the hand, especially if the hand was pretty. All things considered, he may perhaps get to heaven sooner or later; for, like many debtors in the upper circles of society, he doesn’t pay his play-debts, and he also has in his heart an inborn duel-prohibition against shooting and hacking. As yet he is not a man of his word; and if he were poorer, he would steal without a moment’s hesitation. Like a lap-dog, he lies down wagging his tail at the feet of people of any importance, but tugs women by the skirts, or shows his teeth and snarls at them.

Pliant water-weeds of this sort fall away from the very slightest satiric touch, and you can’t manage to hit them with one, richly as they deserve it, because its effect is only proportionate to the resistance it meets with. Siebenkæs would have been better pleased had Von Meyern only been a little rougher and coarser, for it is just these yielding, pitiful, sapless, powerless sort of creatures that filch away good fortune, hard cash, feminine honour, good appointments and fair names, and are exactly like the ratsbane or arsenic, which, when it is good and pure, must be quite white, shining and transparent.

Rosa appeared, I have said, but oh! lovely to behold beyond expression! His handkerchief was a great Molucca of perfume; his two side locks were two small ones. On his waistcoat he had a complete animal kingdom painted (as the fashion of the day was), or Zimmermann’s Zoological Atlas. His little breeches and his little coat, and every thing about him salted the women of the house into Lottish salt-pillars, merely in passing them by on his way upstairs, I must, say, though, that what dazzle me personally, are the rings which emboss six of his fingers,—there were profile portraits, landscapes, stones, even beetle-wing covers all employed in this gold-shoeing of his fingers.

We may quite properly apply to the human hand the expression “it was shod with rings like a horse’s hoof,” it has been long applied to the horse’s hoof itself, and Daubenton has proved, by dissections, that the latter contains all the different parts of the human hand. The use of these hand or finger manacles is quite proper and permissible; indeed rings are indispensable to the fingers of those who ought by rights to have them in their noses. According to the received opinion, these metal spavins, or excrescences of the fingers, were only invented to make pretty hands ugly, as a kind of chain and nose-rings to keep vanity in check; so that fists which are ugly by nature can easily dispense with these disfigurements. I should like to know whether there is anything in another idea of mine bearing on this subject. It is this. Pascal used to wear a great iron ring with sharp spines on it round his naked body, that he might always be ready to punish himself for any vain thought which might occur to him by giving this ring a slight pressure; now is it not perhaps the case that these smaller and prettier rings in a similar way chastise any vain thoughts which may occur, by slightly, but frequently hurting? They seem at least to be worn with some such object, for it is exactly the people who suffer most from vanity who wear the greatest quantities of them, and move about their beringed hands the most.

Unwished-for visits often pass off better than others; on this occasion everyone got on pretty comfortably. Siebenkæs of course was in his own house—and behaved himself accordingly. He and the Venner looked out of the window at the people in the market-place. Lenette, in accordance with her upbringing, and the manners and customs of the middle classes of small towns, didn’t venture to be otherwise than silent, or at the most to take an exceedingly subordinate, obligato, accompanying part in the concert of a conversation between men; she fetched and carried in and out, and, in fact, sat most of the time down stairs with the other women. It was in vain that the courteous, gallant Rosa Everard, tried upon her his wonted wizard spells to root women to a given spot. To her husband he complained that there was little real refinement in Kuhschnappel, and not one single amateur theatre where one could act, as there was in Ulm. He had to order his new books and latest fashions from abroad.

Siebenkæs in return expressed to him merely his enjoyment over the—beggars in the market-place. He made him notice the little boys blowing red wooden trumpets, loud enough to burst the drum of the ear, if not to overthrow the walls of Jericho. But he added, with proper thoughtfulness, that he shouldn’t omit to notice those other poor devils who were collecting the waste bits of split wood in their caps for fuel. He asked him if, like other members of the chamber, he disapproved of lotteries and lotto, and whether he thought it was very bad for the Kuhschnappel common people’s morals that they should be crowding about an old cask turned upside down, with an index fixed to the bottom of it which revolved round a dial formed of gingerbread and nuts, and where the shareholders, for a small stake, carried off from the banker of the establishment, a greedy old harridan of a woman, a nut or a ginger cake. Siebenkæs took pleasure in the little, because in his eyes it was a satirical, caricaturing diminishing mirror of everything in the shape of burgherly pomposity. The Venner saw no entertainment whatever in double-meaning allusions of the kind; but indeed the advocate never dreamt of amusing anybody but himself with them. “I may surely speak out whatever I like to myself,” he once said; “what is it to me if people choose to listen behind my back, or before my face either?”

At length he went down among the people in the market-place, not without the full concurrence of the Venner, who expected at last to be able to have some rational conversation with the wife. Now that Firmian was gone, Everard begun to feel in his element, swimming in his own native pike-pond as it were. As an introductory move he constructed for Lenette a model of her native town; he knew a good many streets and people in Augspurg, and had often ridden through the Fuggery, and it seemed only yesterday, he said, that he saw her there working at a lady’s hat, beside a nice old lady, her mother he should think. He took her right hand in his (in an incidental manner), she allowing him to do so out of gratefulness for calling up such pleasant memories; he pressed it—then suddenly let it go to see if she mightn’t just have returned the pressure the least bit in the world, in the confusion of fingers as it were—or should try to recover the lost pressure. But he might as well have pressed Götz von Berlichingen’s iron hand with his thievish thumb as her warm one. He next came upon the subject of her millinery work, and talked about cap and bonnet fashions like a man who knew what he was talking about; whereas when Siebenkæs mixed himself up with these questions, he displayed no real knowledge of the subject at all. He promised her two consignments, of patterns from Ulm, and of customers from Kuhschnappel. “I know several ladies who must do what I ask them,” he said, and showed her the list of his engagements for the coming winter balls in his pocket-book; “I shan’t dance with them if they don’t give you an order.” “I hope it won’t come to that,” said Lenette (with many meanings). Finally, he was obliged to ask her to let him see her at work for a little, his object here being to weaken the enemy by effecting a diversion of her forces—her eyes being occupied with her needle, she could only have her ears at liberty to observe him with. She blushed as she took two bodkins and stuck one of them into the round red little pincushion of—her mouth; this was more than he could really allow, it was so very dangerous—it formed a hedge against himself—and she might swallow either the stiletto in question, or at all events some of the poisonous verdigris off it. So he drew this lethal weapon with his own hand out of its sheath in her lips, scratching the cherry mouth a little, or not at all—as he loudly lamented—in the process, however. A venner of the right sort considers himself liable in a case of this kind for the fees and expenses consequent upon the accident; Everard, in his liberality, took out his English patent pomade, smeared some on to her left forefinger, and applied the salve to the invisible wound with the finger as a spatula—in doing which he was obliged to take hold of her whole hand as the handle of the spatula, and frequently squeeze it unconsciously. He stuck the unfortunate stiletto itself into his shirt front, giving her his own breastpin instead, and exposing his own tender white breast to—the cold. I particularly beg persons who have had experience in this description of service to give their opinion with firm impartiality on my hero’s conduct, and, sitting in court martial on him, to point out such of his movements and dispositions as they may consider to have been ill-advised.

Now that she was wounded, poor thing, he wouldn’t let her go on working, but only show him her finished productions. He ordered a copy of one of them for Madame von Blaise. He begged her to put it on and let him see it on her—and he set it himself just as Madame von Blaise would wear it. By heaven! it was better even than he had thought; he swore it would suit Madame von Blaise quite as well, as she was just the same height as Lenette. This was all stuff and nonsense, really the one was taller by quite half a nose than the other. Lenette said so herself, she had seen Madame von Blaise at church. Rosa stuck to his own opinion, and swore by his soul and salvation (for in cases of the kind he was given to profane language), and by the sacrament, that he had measured himself with her a hundred times, and that she was half-an-inch taller than himself. “By heaven!” he said, suddenly jumping up, “of course I carry her measure about with me, like her tailor; all that need be done is that you and I measure ourselves together.”

I shall not here withhold from little girls a golden rule of war made by myself, “Don’t argue long with a man, whatever it may be about—warmth is always warmth, even if it only be warmth of argument—one forgets one’s self, and ultimately takes to proving by syllogistic figures, and this is just what the enemy wants—he converts these figures into poetical figures—ultimately even into plastic figures.”

Lenette, a little giddy with the rapid whirl of events, good naturedly stood up to serve as recruit measure for her recruit Rosa; he leant his back to hers. “This won’t do,” he said, “I can’t see,” and unlocked his fingers which had been intertwined together, backwards, over the region of her heart. He turned quickly round, stood before her, and embraced her gently, so as to determine, by comparing the levels of their eyes, whether their brows were an exact height or not. His were glaring quite an inch higher up than hers; he clasped her closely and said, turning red, “you see you were right; but my mistake was that I added your beauty to your height,” and in this proximity he pressed his mouth, red as sealing-wax, upon her lips, very founts and sources of truth as they were.

She was ashamed, annoyed and embarrassed, angry, and ready to cry, but had not the courage to let her indignation break out upon a gentleman of quality. She didn’t speak another word then. He set her and himself at the window, and said he would read her some songs, of rather a different kind, he hoped, to those which were being hawked down in the street. For he was one of the greatest poets in Kuhschnappel, although as yet it was not so much that his verses had made him known, as that he had made his verses known. His poems, like so many others nowadays, were like the muses themselves, children of memory. Every old Frankish town has at least its one fashionable fop, a person who fait les honneurs; and every town, however old, prosaic, imperial-judicature-endowed, possesses its genius, its poet, and sentimentalist; often both these offices are filled by the same individual—as was the case in Kuhschnappel. The greater and likewise the lesser house of assembly looked upon Rosa as a mighty genius, smitten with the genius-epidemic-fever. This disease is something like elephantiasis, of which Troil in his travels in Iceland gives such an accurate description in twenty-four letters, and the principal features of which are that the patient is exactly like an elephant as to hair, cracks, colour, and lumps of the skin, but has not the power of the elephant, and lives in a cold climate.

Everard took a touching elegy out of one of his pockets, the left one, in which (I mean in the elegy) a noble gentleman, lovesick, sang himself to death; and he told her he should like to read it to her, if his feelings would let him get through it without breaking down. However, the poem shortly drew more than one tear and emotion from its owner, and he, to his honour, was constrained to furnish a fresh proof of the fact that however manly and cold he and poets of his stamp can be to the heaviest sorrows of humanity, they really cannot quite contain themselves at the woes of love, but are compelled to weep at them. Meanwhile Rosa, who, like swindlers at play, always kept one eye upon a reflecting surface of some sort—water, window panes, or polished steel for instance, so as to catch a passing glimpse of the female countenance from time to time—saw by means of a little mirror in one of the rings of his left hand, in which hand he was holding the elegy, just a trace or two in Lenette’s eyes of the tragic dew left there by his poem. So he pulled out of his second pocket a ballad (it is, no doubt, printed long ago) in which an innocent child murderess, with a tearful adieu to her lover, throws herself upon a sword. This ballad (very unlike his other poetical children) had real poetic merit, for luckily (for the poem at least) he was a lover of that kind himself, so that he could speak from the heart to the heart. It is not easy to portray the emotion and the melting pitying tears on Lenette’s face; all her heart rose to her tear-dimmed eyes.

It was an experience utterly new to her to be thus agitated by a combination of truth and fiction.

The Venner threw the ballad into the fire, and himself into Lenette’s arms, and cried—

“Oh! you sympathising, noble, holy creature!”

I cannot paint the amazement with which, completely unprepared for and incomprehensive of this transition from crying to kissing, she shoved him away. This made little impression on him; he was on his high horse and said he must have some souvenir of this “sacred entrancing moment”—only a little lock of her hair. Her humble station, his high-flown language, and the fact that she was perfectly unable to form the slightest idea what use her hair would be to him, even supposing she gave enough to stuff a pillow—all this put into her head the foolish idea that he wanted it to perform some magical rite with, such as putting her under a love spell, or something of the sort.

He might have stabbed himself there and then before her, hewn himself in pieces, impaled himself alive, she wouldn’t have interfered; she might indeed have shed her blood to save him, but not a single hair of her head.

He had still one resource in petto—he had really never met with such a case as this before; he lifted up his hand and vowed that he would get Herr von Blaise to recognise her husband as his nephew, and pay over his inheritance—and that with the greatest ease, because he would threaten to jilt his niece unless he did it—if she would just take the scissors and cut off a little hair memorial, no bigger even than the fourth part of a moustache.

She knew nothing about the business of the inheritance, and he was consequently obliged, to the great detriment of his enthusiastic state, to give a prosaic, detailed account of the species facti of the whole of that law suit. By great good fortune he had still in his pocket the number of the ‘Gazette’ in which the inheritance chamber’s inquiry as to the advocate’s existence appeared in print, and he was able to put it into her hands. And now this plundered wife began to cry bitterly, not for the loss of the money, but because her husband had told her nothing about it all this time, and still more because she couldn’t quite make out what her own name really was, or whether she was married to a Siebenkæs or to a Leibgeber. Her tears flowed faster and faster, and in her passion of grief she would have let the deceiver before her have all the pretty hair on her head, had not an accidental circumstance burst the whole chain of events, just as he was kneeling and imploring her for one little lock.

But we must first look after her husband a little, and see how he is getting on, and whither he bends his steps. At first among the market stalls; for the many-throated roaring, and the Olla Podrida of cheap pleasures, and the displayed pattern cards of all the rags out of, and upon, which we human clothes moths construct our covering cases and our abodes—all these caused his mind to sink deep into a sea of humoristic-melancholy reflections concerning this mosaic picture of a life of ours, made up as it is of so many little bits, many-tinted moments, motes, atoms, drops, dust, vapours. He laughed, and listened, with an emotion incomprehensible by many of my readers, to a ballad singer, bawling, with his rhapsodist’s staff in his right hand pointed at a big, staring picture of a horrible murder, and his left full of smaller, printed pictures, for sale, in which the misdeed and the perpetrator of it were displayed to the German public in no brighter colours than those of poetry. Siebenkæs bought two copies, and put them in his pocket, to read in the evening.

This tragic murder picture evoked in the background of his fancy that of the poor girl he had defended, and the gallows, on to which fell those burning tears which had flowed from his wounded heart—that heart which nobody on earth, save one, understood—when last it had been lacerated. He left the noisy market-place, and sought all-peaceful nature, and that isolatorium, destined alike for friendship and for guilt, the gallows. When we pass from the stormy uproar of a fair into the still expanse of wide creation, entering into the dim aisles of nature’s hushed cathedral, the strange sudden calm, is to the soul as the caressing touch of some beloved hand.

With a sad heart he climbed up to the well-known spot, whose ugly name I shall omit, and from these ruins he gazed around upon creation, as if he were the last of living beings. Neither in the blue sky, nor upon the wide earth, was there voice or sound; nothing but one forlorn cricket, chirping in monosyllables, among the bare furrows, where the harvest had been cleared away. The troops of birds flocking together with discordant cries flew to the green nets spread upon the ground—and not to meet the green spring far away. Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead, above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim phantom forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was draped in clinging folds, as if all nature, trembling into dust, must vanish in its wreaths. But one bright thought pierced these dark fogs of nature and the soul, turning them to a white gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently lighting upon flowers. He turned his face to the north-east, to the hills which lay between him and his other heart, and up from behind them rose, like an early moon in harvest, a pale image of his friend. The spring, when he should go to him and see him once more, was at work already preparing for him a fair broad pathway thither, all rich with grass and flowers. Ah! how we play with the world about us, so quickly dressing it all with the webs which our own spirits spin.

The cloudless sky seemed sinking closer to the dusky earth, bright with a softer blue. And though a whole long winter lay between, the music of the coming spring already came, faint and distant, to his ear; it was there in the evening chime of the cattle bells down in the meadows, in the birds’ wild wood notes in the groves, and in the free streams flowing fast away amid the flowery tapestries that were yet to be.

A palpitating chrysalis was hanging near him still in her half-shrivelled caterpillar’s case, sleeping away the time till the flower cups all should open; phantasy, that eye of the soul, saw beyond and over the sheaves of autumn the glories of a night in June; every autumn-tinted tree seemed blooming once again; their bright coloured crests, like magnified tulips, painted the autumn mist with rainbow dyes; light breezes of early May seemed chasing each other through the fresh, fluttering leaves; they breathed upon our friend, and buoyed him up, and rose with him on high, and held him up above the harvest and above the hills, till he could see beyond these hills and lands—and lo! the springs of all his life to come, lying as yet enfolded in the bud, lay spread before his sight like gardens side by side—and there, in every spring time, stood his friend.

He left the place, but wandered a long while about the meadows, where at this time of year there was no need to hunt carefully for footpaths—chiefly that his eyes might not betray where his thoughts had been to all the market people who were to be met. It was of little use—for in certain moods the torn and wounded heart, like injured trees, bleeds on and on, and at the slightest touch.

He shunned eye-witnesses, such as Rosa above all, for this reason, that he was (I am sorry to have to say it) in just one of those moods when, whether from modesty or from vividness of feeling, he was most disposed to mask his emotion under the semblance of temper. At last a weapon of victory came to his hand, the thought that he had to apologize and make amends to his guest for so long and so uncourteous an absence.

When he got home what a strange state of matters! The old guest gone—another there in his place—and near the latter his wife in tears. When he came into the room, Lenette went to one of the windows, and a fresh torrent of tears fell down. “Madame Siebenkæs,” said the Schulrath, continuing his address to her, and keeping hold of her hand, “submit yourself to the will of God, I beseech you; nothing has happened but what can be put to rights without difficulty. I am willing to concede you a sorrow of the heart—but it must be a restrained and a subdued one.”

Lenette looked out of the window, not at her husband.

The Schulrath related, in the first place, all that I have already given my account of (Firmian, listening to him and looking at him, took the glowing hand of Lenette, whose face was still averted), and then continued—

“When I came in, merciful Heavens, there was his lordship on his knees before Madame Siebenkæs, with carnal tears, and—I am constrained to have the gravest suspicions—a design upon her precious honour! However, I raised him up, without the least ceremony, and I said to him, with the boldness of St. Paul himself—for which I am ready to answer before God and man—‘Your Lordship, are these the doctrines which I inculcated into your Lordship when I was your private tutor; is it Christian conduct to go down upon your knees in such a manner? Fie, for shame, Herr von Meyern. Fie, for shame, Herr von Meyern!’”

Here the Schulrath got into a terrible heat again, and strode up and down the room with his hands in the pockets of his plush coat.

Firmian said, “It’s a simple matter to set up a scarecrow and plant a hedge to keep off a hare like him; but what ails you, love,” he said, “and what are you crying so bitterly about?”

She cried more bitterly than ever; when the Schulrath planted his hands on his sides, and said to her in much wrath, “Very well, Madame Siebenkæs, this is the way of it, is it? This is all the impression my good counsel and comforting words have made upon your mind, is it? I never should have believed it of you!

“It was all for nothing then (as I am constrained to conclude) that, when I had the honour of bringing you here from Augspurg in my carriage, I described to you with all the eloquence at my command, the blessedness of the married state, before you had had an opportunity of learning it by experience; it seems I might just as well have spoken to the winds of heaven. Can it really be the case that all that I said to you in the carriage simply went in at one ear and out at the other? when I told you how happy a wife was in and through her husband, how she often could hardly help crying for joy at possessing him—how these two had but one heart and one flesh, and shared everything between them, joy and sorrow, every morsel of food, every wish and desire, ay and the very smallest secrets. Well, well, Madame Siebenkæs, I see the Schulrath may keep his breath to cool his porridge.”

Upon this she twice wiped and dried her eyes hurriedly, constrained herself to look at him very kindly indeed, and with a forced appearance of being quite pleased again, and said with a deep sigh, but softly and not in a tone of pain, “Oh dear me!”

The Schulrath touched her hand as it hung down with his finger tips in a priestly manner, and said—

“But may the Lord be your physician and helper in all your necessities” (he could hardly say more, for his tears were coming), “Amen,—which is, being interpreted, ‘Yea, verily, so mote it be.’” Here he embraced and kissed the husband, and this with much warmth, saying, “Send for me, if your wife can obtain no consolation—and may God give you both strength. O, by the by—the very thing I came here about—the review of the Easter programme must be ready by Wednesday—and I am in your debt for the eight lines or more you did about that piece of rubbish the other day, which you gave such a capital dressing to.”

When he had gone, however, Lenette didn’t seem so thoroughly consoled as might have been expected: she leant at the window sunk in deep, hopeless, amazement and reflection. It was in vain that Firmian pointed out that of course he wasn’t going to change his and her present name any more, and that her honour, marriage, and love didn’t depend upon a wretched name or so up or down, but upon himself and his heart. She restrained her tears, but she continued to be troubled and silent the whole of the evening.

Now let no one call our good Firmian over jealous or suspicious when, having just got well rid of one wretched sacrilegious robber of marriage honour, the Venner, the idea of a volcanic eruption which might throw stones and ashes all over a great tract of his life suddenly occurs to him; what if his friend Stiefel should be really (as it almost seems) falling in love with his wife, in all innocence, himself. His whole behaviour from the very beginning—his attentions on the wedding-day, his constant visits, and even his exasperation with the Venner that very day, and his warm feeling and sympathy on the occasion altogether, all these were the separate parts of a pretty coherent whole, and seemed to indicate a deep and growing affection, thoroughly honourable, no doubt, and unperceived by himself. Whether or not a spark of it had jumped off into Lenette’s heart, and was smouldering there, it was impossible as yet to determine; but true and good as he knew his wife and his friend to be, his hopes and his fears could not but be pretty equally balanced.

Dear hero! Do continue to be one! Destiny, as I see more and more clearly as time goes on, seems to have made up her mind gradually to join the separate pieces of a drill machine together with which to pierce through the diamond of thy stoicism; or else by slow degrees to build and fashion English scraping and singeing machines (made out of poverty, household worries, law suits, and jealousy) to scrape and singe away from thee every rough and ill-placed fibre, as if you were a web of finest English cloth. If this should be so, do but come out of the mill as splendid a piece of English stuff as was ever brought to the Leipzig cloth and book fair, and you will be glorious indeed.

CHAPTER IV.

A MATRIMONIAL PARTIE À LA GUERRE—LETTER TO THAT HAIR COLLECTOR, THE VENNER—SELF-DECEPTIONS—ADAM’S MARRIAGE SERMON—SHADOWING AND OVER-SHADOWING.

There is nothing which I observe and note down with more scrupulous and copious accuracy than two equinoctial periods, the matrimonial equinox when, after the honeymoon, the sun enters the constellation Libra (or the balance), and the meteorologic vernal equinox; because, by observing the weather which prevails at these two periods, I am enabled to prognosticate with surprising accuracy the nature of that which will characterise the succeeding season. I consider the first storm of the spring to be always the most important, and similarly, the first matrimonial storm; the others all come from the same quarter.

When the Schulrath was gone, the poor’s advocate took his sulky house-goddess into his arms, and plied her with every conceivable method of proof; with proofs derived from immemorial hearsay, partial proofs, evidential proof, proof on oath, and by logical deduction—every kind of proof wherewith one can harden one’s own heart, or soften another’s.

But the whole of the evidence he adduced was useless. He might just as well have been embracing the cold hard angel at the baptismal font in the principal church, his own angel remained quite as cold and silent. Furboots had been the tourniquet which stopped the hemorrhage of Lenette’s open, streaming artery; but his departure had taken the German tinder stopping from her eyes and now they streamed unstanched.

Siebenkæs went often to the window, and up and down in the room, that she might not see that he was following her example, and that her sorrow, little reasonable as it was, infected him by sympathy. We can more easily bear, and forgive pain of our own causing than of another’s. All the following day there was an unendurable silence in the house. This was the very first of the beds of the matrimonial nursery-garden in which a seed of the apple of discord had been planted, and as yet not the faintest rustle of its sap was audible. It is not in the first domestic squabble, not till the fourth, tenth, ten-thousandth, that a woman can keep perfect silence with her tongue, yet make a tremendous noise with her body, and turn every chair which she shoves about, and every reel of cotton which she lets fall, into a language-machine and fountain of speech, and play her instrumental music all the louder, because her vocal parts are counting their rests. Lenette Wendeline moved everything and said everything, as softly as if her liege lord had the gout and was lying with cramped foot pressed in agony against the trembling bottom board of his bed.

When the third day of this came on, he was vexed and annoyed—and he had reason. I beg to say that, for my own part, I should be quite prepared to quarrel with my own wife, if I had one—ay, and to do it with a will—and that to some purpose, and to bandy words with her, as well as letters (though I should prefer the former). But there’s one thing which would kill me outright, and that would be her keeping up a long, dreary, tearful sulking, a thing which, like the sirocco wind, ends by blowing out all a man’s lights, thoughts, and joys, and at length his life itself. Just as we all of us, rather like a violent thunderstorm in summer, and think it refreshing rather than otherwise in itself—and yet consider it a cursed nuisance on the whole, because it’s sure to be followed by some days of dreary wet weather. Siebenkæs was all the more vexed on this occasion, because he was a man who scarcely ever was vexed. As other jurists have reckoned themselves among men exempt from torture, so Siebenkæs had long ago fortified himself against grief and care, those torture racks of the soul (by the help of Epictetus), as effectually as he had the infanticide against bodily torture.

The Jews hold that when Messiah comes, hell will be joined on to paradise, so as to make a bigger dancing saloon. And all the year long, Siebenkæs occupied himself in building and adding on his torture chambers and schools of suffering to the entertainment halls of his bagatelle, so as to have more room to perform his ballets.

He often said a medal should be struck for any citizen who should be three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds, without either growling or snarling.

He wouldn’t have got that medal himself in the year 1785. On the third day, the Saturday, he was so wild at his wife’s speechlessness, that he was wilder still with that kill-joy of an Everard. For, of course, that minnesinger, might come in again at any moment, bringing in his company the goddess of discord (who, as directrix and ambassadress, performs such important poetical functions in Voltaire’s Henriade), and introducing her into the homely “Volkslied” of an advocate, by way of a dea ex machina to unloose the matrimonial knot, and tie a fresh one with the Venner. Siebenkæs accordingly wrote him the following academic-controversial document.

“May it please your Lordship,

“I take the liberty to lay before your Lordship in this little memorial my humble petition,

“That you will be pleased to stay at home, and spare me the honour of your visits.

“Should your Lordship find it necessary to become possessed of a certain quantity of my wife’s hair—the undersigned hereby undertakes to cut and deliver the same himself. In the event of your Lordship’s being minded to exercise a jus compascui, or right of free common and pasturage in my premises, and appearing therein in person, I shall embrace with much pleasure the opportunity then afforded me of plucking as many of your Lordship’s own hairs as may be requisite to constitute a souvenir out of your Lordship’s head, by the roots, like monthly radishes, with my own hands. While I was in Nürnberg, I used often to go and dine in the neighbouring villages (against the will of the authorities) with a fine old Prugel Knecht,[^[27]] i. e. with a private tutor, who had towzed out and excerpted from the heads of three little slips of nobility, while he was giving them their lessons, enough silky hair to make him a handsome mouse-coloured bag-wig, which the man most probably wears to this day. His motive in thus applying himself to the production of silk, or rather, his reason for divesting these little heads of their exterior foliage, was, that his own beams might the more effectually ripen the fruit within, as, for similar reasons, it is usual to remove leaves from the vines in August.

“I have the honour to remain, &c.”

I shall be very sorry if I cannot manage to get the reader to understand that the advocate wrote this biting letter without the slightest bitterness of feeling. He had read the brilliant satirical writings of the three merry wise men of London, Butler, Swift, and Sterne—those three bodies of the satirical giant, Geryon, or three furies (Parcæ) of the foolish—to such an extent that, as their disciple and follower, he never thought whether it was a biting letter or not. In his admiration of the artistic beauties of his composition, he lost sight of its meaning; and indeed, if a stinging speech were made to himself, he would think nothing of the length of its prickles in comparison with its form and shape. I need merely instance his ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers;’ the satirical poison bubbles and venomous prickles so frequent in that work came from his pen and ink—i. e. his head only, not from his heart.

I take the opportunity of begging the reader always to infuse the very soul of gentleness and kindness into every word and tone he utters (because it is our words more than our deeds which make people angry), and, more particularly still, into every page he writes. For, truly, even if your correspondents have forgiven you an epistolary pereat long ago, yet the old leaven of ill-will ferments anew, if the sorrel-leaf of a letter containing it chances to come to hand again. We may, of course, on the other hand, reckon upon a similar immortality for a piece of epistolary kindness. Truly, though a long, cutting December wind had made my heart stiff and immoveable to everything in the shape of kindly feeling for one who, once on a time, used to write me absolute Epistles of St. John, tender pastorals of letters, what would it matter, if I should but chance to turn up these old letters in my letter-treasury of bundles and packets of letters?

The sight of the beloved handwriting, the welcome seal, the kind, endearing words, and the pieces of paper where so many a pleasure found space to sport and play, would cast the sunshine of the old affection upon the frozen heart once more; it would reopen at the memory of the dear old time, as some flower that has closed reopens when a sunbeam lights upon it, and its only thought—ay, were it but the day before yesterday that it had conceived itself mortally offended—would be, “Ah! I was too hard upon him (or her) after all.” Many of the saints in the first century used to drive devils out of the possessed, in a somewhat similar way, merely by means of letters.

Furboots came, as if he had been sent for, on the Saturday evening, like a Jewish Sabbath. I have often seen a guest serve as cement or hefting powder to two better halves in a state of fracture, because shame and necessity compelled them to speak and behave kindly to each other, at all events while the guest was there. Every husband should be provided with two or three visitors of this sort, to come in when he’s suffering from an attack of wife-possessed-too-long-with-the-devil-of-dumbness; as long as the people are there, at all events, she must speak, and take the iron thief-apple of silence—which grows on the same stalk as the apple of discord—out of her mouth.

The Schulrath stood up before Lenette Wendeline as if she were one of his school girls, and asked her if she had borne this first cross of her married life patiently, and like a worthy sister in suffering of the patriarch Job. She drooped her big eyes, wound a thread the length of a finger into a white snowball, and breathed deeper. Her husband answered for her: “I was her brother in affliction, and bore the cross-bar of the burden—I without a murmur, she without a murmur. In the twelfth century, the heap of ashes on which Job endured his sufferings used still to be shown. Our two chairs are our heaps of ashes; there they are still to be seen!”

“Good woman!” said Stiefel, in the softest pianissimo of his pedal reed-stop of a masculine voice, and laid his snow-white hand on the soft, raven hair upon her forehead. Siebenkæs heard a multiplying sympathetic echo of these words in his heart, and laid his arm on Lenette’s shoulders, who was blushing with pleasure at the honour conferred upon her by this kindness of the man in office. Her husband softly pressed her left side to his right, and said:—

“She is good, indeed; she is gentle, and quiet, and patient, and only too industrious. If the whole tag, rag and bobtail of Hell’s army, in the shape of the Venner, had only not advanced upon our little summer-house of happiness, to knock its roof off, we should have lived happy in it for many a day, Mr. Stiefel, far into the winter of our lives. For my Lenette is good, and too good for me and for many another man.” Here Stiefel, in his emotion, surrounded that hand of hers which had the skein of thread in it, at the seat of the pulse with his fine fingers—the empty hand being in her husband’s possession—and the Wound Water of our pain, the great drops of which trickled from her drooped eyes down her cheeks, where her imprisoned hands could not wipe them away, made the two male hearts very tender. And besides, her husband could never praise any one long without his eyes overflowing. He went on, faster, “Yes, she might have been very comfortable and well-off with me, but that my mother’s money is kept back from me in this terrible way. But, even for all that, I should have made her happy without the money, and she me—we never had a word, never a single unhappy moment—now had we, Lenette? nothing but peace and love, till the Venner came. He has taken a good deal from us!”

The Schulrath raised his clenched fist in wrath, and exclaimed, sawing the air with it, “You child of hell! you robber-captain and filibuster! You silken Catiline and mischief-maker! Does it ever strike you that you’ll have to answer for this and your other pranks one day? Mr. Siebenkæs, this, at all events, I do expect of you, that if ever he comes here again asking for hair, you will turn him out by the hair of his own head, or hit this fur-maggot (as you call him yourself) across the shoulders with a boot-jack, and squeeze his hand with a pair of pincers—in fact, the long and the short of it is, I will not have him come here any more.”

And here Siebenkæs, to cool down his own emotions and other people’s, mentioned the fact of his having already taken steps in the matter, and served the necessary letter of inhibition upon the Venner. Stiefel clucked his tongue in a joyful manner, and nodded his head approvingly. He considered any person high in office to be a vicegerent of Christ on earth, a count to be a demigod, and an emperor as a whole one;—but a single one of the deadly sins committed by any of them all would at once cost them the whole of his deferential good will,—and a slip in Latin grammar, though committed by a head crowned with gold, he would at once have done battle with in a whole Latin Easter programme. Men of “the world have straight bodies and crooked souls; scholars often have neither the one nor the other. The last of Lenette’s clouds cleared away when she heard that a paper escarpment and cheval de frise against the Venner had been constructed at her door. “Then he will trouble me no more! Thanks be to Heaven! He goes about lying and deceiving everyone he comes across.”[^[28]]

“We don’t employ these words, Madame Siebenkæs, if we care to speak grammatically,” said Stiefel; “irregular verbs such as ‘kriechen, trügen, lügen,’ though they are verba anomala, and as such have ‘kroch, log, trog,’ and so on in the imperfect tense, are still always inflected quite regularly in the present by the best German grammarians—although the poets permit themselves a poetical license in such cases, as, I am sorry to say, they do in most others—and therefore we say, if we care to be grammatically correct, ‘lügt, trügt, kriecht,’ &c., at the present day, that is.”

“Don’t find fault with my dear Augspurger’s Lutheran inflections,” said Siebenkæs; “there’s something touching to me about these irregular verbs of hers; they are the Schmalkaldian article of the Augspurg confession.” Here she drew her husband’s ear softly down to her lips and said, “What would you like me to get for supper? Tell the gentleman that you know I mean no offence, whatever words I use. And I wish you would ask his reverence, Firmian dear, when I’m out of the room, whether our marriage is really all right according to the Bible.” He asked this question on the spot. Stiefel answered it deliberately as follows:—“We have only to look at the case of Leah, who was conducted to Jacob’s tent under the pseudonym of Rachel on her marriage night, and whose marriage the Bible holds to be perfectly valid. Is it names or bodies that exchange rings? And can a name fulfil the marriage vow?”

Lenette answered these questions, and spoke her thanks for this consistorial decision by a bashful glance of restored content and a beaming face upturned towards him. She went to the kitchen, but kept constantly coming back and snuffing the candle, which was on the table at which the two gentlemen sat talking; and probably nobody, except the advocate and I, will consider this to be any indication of a more than ordinary liking for Stiefel. The latter always took the snuffers from her, saying “it was his duty.” Siebenkæs clearly perceived that both the apples of his eyes revolved, satellite-fashion, round his own planet, Lenette; but he did not grudge the Latin knight his little glimpse of an age of chivalry thus sweetened by a Dulcinea; like most men, he could far sooner pardon the rival lover than the unfaithful fair; women, on the other hand, hate the rival more than the unfaithful lover. Moreover, he knew perfectly that Stiefel had not the least idea himself whom or what he cared for or sighed for, and that he was a far better hand at reviewing schoolmen and authors than himself. For instance, his own anger he called professional zeal; his pride, the dignity due to his office; his passions, sins of weakness; and on this occasion love appeared to him disguised as mere philanthropy. The arch of Lenette’s troth was firmly finished off in the keystone of religion, and the Venner’s assault upon it had not shaken this sacred masonry in the slightest degree.

At this juncture the postman stumped up stairs with a new constellation which he set in their serene family sky, namely, the following letter from Leibgeber.

“Bayreuth, 21 Sept., 1785.

“My dear Brother, Cousin, and Uncle,
Father and Son!

“For the two auricles and the two ventricles of thy heart constitute my entire genealogical tree:—as Adam, when he went for a walk, carried about with him the whole of his blood relations that were to be, and his long line of descendants—which is not wholly unreeled and wound up even at this day—till he became a father, and his wife bare a child. I wish to goodness I had been the first Adam! Siebenkæs, I do adjure you, let me, let me, follow up this idea which has struck me and taken hold of me with such power; let me not write a word in this letter that does not add a touch to the three-quarter-length portrait which I shall draw of myself as the first father of mankind!

“Men of learning are much mistaken who suppose my reason for wishing I were Adam to be, that Puffendorf and many other writers very properly award me the whole of this earth as a kind of European colony in the India of the universe, as my patrimonium Petri, Pauli, Judæ and the rest of the Apostles; inasmuch as I, being the sole Adam and man, and consequently the first and last of universal monarchs (although as yet without any subjects), might of course lay claim to the entire earth. It might occur to the pope, indeed (he being holy father, though not our first father), to make a similar claim, or rather it did occur to him some centuries ago, when he constituted himself the guardian and the heir of all the countries of the earth, and indeed made bold to set two other crowns on the top of his earthly one, a crown of heaven and a crown of hell.

“How small a thing it is that I desire! All that I wish I had been the old Adam (in fact, the oldest Adam) for, is merely that I might have strolled up and down with Eve among the espaliers of Eden on our marriage night, in our aprons and beasts’ skins, and delivered an address in Hebrew to the mother of all living.

“Before commencing my address I beg to observe that, while I was yet unfallen, it fortunately occurred to me to note down the more important heads of my universal knowledge. For I had, in my condition of innocence, a perfect and intuitive knowledge of all the sciences, of history, both universal and literary, the various criminal and other codes of law, all the dead languages as well as the living, and was a kind of live Pindus and Pegasus, a portable Lodge of Light and learned society, a pocket university, and miniature golden Siècle de Louis XIV. Considering what my mental powers were at that juncture it is a miracle (and what’s more, a very lucky job) that in my leisure moments I put down the cream of my universal knowledge on paper, because when I subsequently fell, and became simple and ignorant, I had these excerpts, or Catalogues raisonnés, of my former wisdom by me, so that I could refer to them.

“‘Virgin!’ (it was thus that the sermon delivered outside Paradise commenced) ‘it is true we are the first of parents, and are minded to originate all the subsequent parents; though all that you think about is sticking your spoon into a forbidden apple. However, I, being a man and protoplast, reflect and ponder, and as we walk to and fro, I shall undertake the office of preacher of the sermon on this, the occasion of our entering into the bonds of wedlock (not having as yet, unfortunately, begotten anybody else to do it), and, in a brief wedding exhortation, direct your attention to the doubts affecting and the reasons deciding, the protoplasts, or the first parents and first of wedded couples (that is to say, you and me), in the act of reflecting and considering, and how—

“‘In the first place, they consider the reasons why they should not people the earth, but emigrate this very day, the one into the old world, the other into the new; and

“‘In the second place, the reasons why they should do nothing of the kind, but marry.

“‘After which a short elench, or usus epanorthoticus, will be adduced, and will conclude the lecture and the night.’

IN THE FIRST PLACE

“‘My dearly beloved!

“‘Here, in my sheepskin, as I appear before you, grave, thoughtful, and wise, it is nevertheless the fact that I am full to the very brim of—not so much follies as fools, with a good many wise men stuck in here and there between them by way of parentheses. I am of short stature, it is true, and the ocean[^[29]] came a good deal above my ancles, and besprinkled my new beasts’ skin; and yet, as I walk up and down here, I am girt about with a seed cloth, containing the seeds of all nations, and carrying the repertory of the whole human race, an entire world in miniature and orbis pictus, round my middle like a pedlar’s stock in trade. For Bonnet, who is in me among the rest, will sit down at his desk (when he comes out), and prove that they are all one inside the other, like a nest of boxes or a set of parentheses, that the father contains the son, that the grandfather contains them both, the great-grandfather consequently the grandfather and all the contents of him, the great-great-grandfather the great-grandfather and the contents of his contents and all his episodes, all sitting waiting one inside the other. Are there not then here embodied in thy bridegroom—this is a point, dear bride, which cannot be made too intelligible to you—all religious sects, excepting the Preadamites, but including the Adamites,[^[30]] and all giants, the great Christopher himself among them every individual of every nation of all the earth—all the shiploads of negroes destined for America, and the packets marked with red containing the soldiers promised by England to Anspach and Bayreuth? Eve, am I not, as I stand here before you, a whole Jews’-quarter—a Louvre of all the crowned heads of the earth—since I can bring them all into existence if I please, and if I am not induced by this first head of my discourse to refrain from doing so? You will admire me, and yet laugh at me at the same time if you but look at me well, lay your hand on my shoulder, and say to yourself: “Now, in this man and protoplast are contained all mankind, all the learned faculties, all schools of philosophy, and of sewing and spinning, cheek by jowl in peace and harmony, the highest and noblest royal families and princely houses (though not yet sorted out from among the common ship’s company), all free imperial orders of knighthood, packed higgledy-piggledy with their vassals, cottiers, and tenants, it is true—monasteries and nunneries next door to each other—barracks and members of Parliament, to say nothing of cathedral chapters, with all their provosts, deans, priors, sub-priors, and canons! What a man! What an Anak!” you will add. You are right, dear, I am indeed—the very nest dollar of the human coin-cabinet, the universal court of assembly of all judicatures, with all the members of all assemblies, not one out of its place, the walking corpus juris of all civil, canon, criminal, feudal, and municipal law. Haven’t I Meusel’s ‘Learned Germany’ and Jöcher’s ‘Scholastic Lexicon’ within me all complete, and Jöcher and Meusel themselves, to say nothing of their supplementary volumes? I wish I could just let you see Cain—who, if head second of this discourse should determine me, would be our first offshoot and sucker, our Prince of Wales, Calabria, Asturias and the Brazils. You would see, if he were transparent—as I believe him to be—how he contains all the rest, one inside the other, like beer glasses—all œcumenical councils, inquisitions, and propaganda, and the devil and his grandmother. But, loveliest, thou didst not write down any of thy scientia media before thy fall, as I did, and consequently thou starest into the future as blind as a bat. I, however, who see into it quite clearly, am enabled by my chrestomathy to perceive that, where other men beget perhaps some ten fools, I shall beget whole millions of tens, and units into the bargain, seeing that the Bohemians, Parisians, Viennese, Leipzigers, Bayreuthers, Hofians, Dublinese, Kuhschnappelers (and their wives and daughters over and above) have all got to come into existence through me, and that in every million of them there will always be at least five hundred who neither have, nor will listen to, reason. Duenna, as yet you know little of the human race, but two in fact, for the serpent is not one; but I know what sort of race I am going to produce, and that in opening my limbus infantum, I open at the same time a Bedlam. By heaven, I weep and lament when I merely peep in between the leaves of the centuries in their long course, and see nothing there but gouts of gore, and a congeries of idiots—when I think of the trouble and pain to be undergone before a century shall learn to write a legible hand, a hand even as good as a minister’s or an elephant’s trunk—before poor humanity gets through its dame’s school, and private tutors, and French governesses, so as to be fit for Latin grammar schools, public schools, Jesuit seminaries, and next for fencing classes, dancing classes, dogmatic and clinical courses. By old Harry, I feel hot. Nobody will think of you as the brood-hen of the coming flock of starlings, as the spawning codfish in whom Leuwenhack will count 9½ millions of eggs; not you, my little Eve, but your husband, will get all the blame, who should have known better, and rather begotten nothing than such a rabble of thieves and robbers, crowned emperors on the Roman throne, and vicegerents on the Roman chair, the former of whom will call themselves after Antoninus and Cæsar, the latter after Christus and Petrus, and among whom there are men whose thrones shall be Lüneburg torture chairs for the human race, if not the converse of a Place de Grève, where the masses shall be put to death, and the single individual feted and amused.[^[31]] And I shall be taken to task on account of Borgia, Pizarro, St. Dominic, and Potemkin. Even supposing I should manage to evade being blamed for black exceptions such as these, I should be obliged to admit that my descendants really cannot get through the space of half-an-hour without either thinking or doing something foolish, that the war of giants, waged in them by their passions, is never broken by a peace, seldom even by a truce; that the greatest of all man’s faults is that he has such a number of little ones; that his conscience serves for scarcely anything but hating his neighbours and being morbidly sensitive to their transgressions; that he never leaves off evil ways till he is on his deathbed; that, he learns and loves the language of virtue, but is at enmity with the virtuous—just as the English employ French language teachers, though they detest the French themselves. Eve, Eve, we shall have little to congratulate ourselves upon if we marry; Adam means in the original “red earth,” and truly my cheeks will consist entirely thereof, and will blush scarlet at the mere thought of the indescribable and unparalleled conceit and vanity of our great-grandchildren, increasing as the centuries go on. Nobody will tweak himself by the nose—unless perhaps when he is shaving. Critics will set themselves up above authors, authors above critics—Heimlicher von Blaise will give his hand to be kissed by orphans; ladies theirs to be kissed by all and sundry; mighty ones the embroidered hems of their garments. Eve, I had only got as far on with my prophetic extracts from the world’s history as the sixth century, when you bit the apple under the tree, and I, like a fool, did as you did, and everything slipped out of my head: God only knows what sort of a set the fools and foolesses of the subsequent centuries may turn out to be. Virgin, wilt thou now put into action thy Sternocleidomastoideum, as Sömmering styles the muscle which nods the head, and so express your “yes” when I put to you the question, “Wilt thou have the marriage-preacher to thy wedded husband?”

“‘You will no doubt reply, let us first hear the second head of the discourse, in which the subject is considered from another point of view. And indeed, dearly beloved, we had almost forgotten that we must proceed to the

SECOND PLACE,

and consider the reasons which may persuade first parents to become such, and to marry, and serve Destiny in the capacity of sewing and spinning machines of linseed, hemp, flax, and tow, to be wound by her in endless networks and coils around the earthly sphere. My strongest reason, and, I trust, yours also, is the thought of the Day of Judgment. For, in the event of our becoming the entrepreneurs of the human race, I shall see all my descendants, when they ascend from the calcined earth like vapour, at the last day, into the nearest planet, and fall into order for the last review; and among this harvest of children and grandchildren, I shall hit upon a few sensible people with whom one may be able to exchange a rational word or two—men whose whole lives were passed, as well as lost, amid thunder and lightning (as according to the Romans those whom the gods loved were killed by lightning), and who never closed their eyes or their ears, however wild the storm. I see the four heathen evangelists among them too, Socrates, Cato, Epictetus, and Antoninus, men who went through the world, using their voices like fire-engine pipes, two hundred feet long, to save people from being burnt out of house and home by the fire of their own passions, sluicing them all over with pure, cold, Alp-water. And there can be no doubt after all, that I may really be the arch-papa, and you the arch-mamma, of some very great and celebrated people, that’s to say, if we choose. I tell you, Eve, that I have it here in black and white among my excerpts and collectanea that I shall be the forefather, ancestor, and Bethlehem of an Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Rousseau, Goethe, Kant, Leibnitz, people, take them for all in all, who are as able thinkers as their protoplast himself, if not abler. Eve, thou active and important member of the fruit-bearing jointstock company, or productive class of the state (consisting of thyself and this marriage-preacher), I assure you I expect to pass a few hours of exquisite enjoyment when on that neighbouring star I survey in a cursory manner that classic concourse newly risen from the dead, and at length kneel down, and cry, “Good morning, my children! Such of you as are Jews were wont to utter an ejaculatory prayer when ye met a wise man; but what such utterance would suffice for me, now that I behold all the wise and all the faculties at once, all of them my own blood relations too, who amid the wolfish hunger of their desires have stedfastly refrained from forbidden apples, pears, and pine apples, and, deep as their thirst for wisdom might be, committed no orchard-robbery on the tree of knowledge, though their first parents seized upon the forbidden fruit, although they had never known what hunger was, and upon the tree of knowledge, although they possessed all knowledge, except knowledge of the serpent nature.” And then I shall arise from the ground, pass into the angelic crowd, fall on the bosom of some distinguished descendant, and, throwing my arms around him, say, “Thou, true, good, contented-minded, gentle son! If I could just have shown thee only, sitting in thy brood-cell, to my Eve, the queen-bee of this great swarm here present, at the time when I was delivering the second head of my marriage sermon, I’m sure she would have listened to reason, and given a favourable answer.’”

“And thou, Siebenkæs, art that same, true, good son, and thou restest ever on the warm, heaving breast of

“Thy Friend.

“Postscript and Clausula Salutaris.

“Please to forgive me this merry private ball and witches’ dance upon cheap and nasty letter-paper, notwithstanding that you are unfortunately an infinitesimal fractional part of the German race, and as such, can’t be expected either to stand, or to understand, such a dance of ideas. This is why I never print anything for the unwieldy German intellect; entire sheets which I have spawned full of playful idea-fishes of this sort I consign at once to regions where such productions do not usually arrive till they attain the evening of their days, having previously exercised the right of transit through the booksellers’ shops. I was eight days in Hof, and am at present living a retired life at Bayreuth; in both of these towns I have made faces, that is, other people’s profiles; but most of the heads which sat or stood to my scissors opined that all was not quite right in mine. Tell me the real truth of the matter; it’s not altogether a matter of indifference to me, because if I should turn out not to be quite ‘all there,’ I should be incapable of devising my property by will, or of exercising various civil functions.

“In conclusion, I send a thousand kind remembrances and kisses to your dear, good Lenette, and my compliments to Herr Schulrath Stiefel, and will you please ask him if he is any relation to Magister Stiefel, the rector of Holzdorf and Lochau (in Wittemberg), who prophesied (incorrectly, as I consider) that the end of the world would take place on the 1st January, 1533, at 8 o’clock in the morning, and lived to die in his own bed after all. I also send, for you and the ‘Advertiser,’ a couple of programmes of Professor Lang’s of this place, relative to the General Superintendent of Bayreuth, and one of Dr. Frank’s of Pavia. There is a very charming young lady, exceedingly clever and intellectual, living here at the Sun Hotel (she is in the front rooms, and I in the back). She has been very much pleased with me and my face, I am happy to tell you, seeing how exactly you and I are alike, the only difference between us being my lame foot. So that the things I pride myself upon in ladies’ society are my likeness to you and my weaknesses. Unless I have been misinformed, this lady is a poor niece of your old uncle’s with the broken glass wig, and is being brought up at his expense, and destined for a marriage with some Kuhschnappeler of the upper ten thousand. Perhaps she may soon be forwarded to you, entered in the way-bill as bridegroom’s effects.

“The above is my oldest news, but my newest news, namely your own self, I shall not expect to arrive here at Bayreuth till I and the spring get back to it together (for the day after to-morrow I am off to meet it in Italy), and we, I and the spring, together beautify the world to such a degree that you will certainly enjoy a happy time of it in Bayreuth, the houses and the hills of that place being so particularly charming. And so, fare thee somewhat well.”

They all felt certain that the Kuhschnappeler of rank for whom the Heimlicher’s niece was being brought up could be none other than the Venner Rosa, whose little burnt-down stump of a heart—what was left of it after being hitherto made use of to set fire to the bosoms of female humanity in general (as the lamp in a smoking-room serves to kindle the pipes of the collective frequenters thereof)—would be the marriage torch to light her to her new home.

As there were three heavens in this letter—one for each of the party—kind remembrances for Lenette, the programmes for Peltzstiefel, the letter itself for Siebenkæs—I shouldn’t have been astonished if the terzetto of them had danced for joy. The Schulrath, intoxicated with delight—for the glad blood rose to his sober head—opened the papers sent him upon the square patterned supper-cloth (which was laid already), and hungrily began to devour his three printed “relishes before supper,” and literary petits soupers, upon the tin plate without even saying grace, until an invitation to stay and have some supper reminded him that he must be off. But before leaving, he petitioned that, by way of fee for having acted as middleman and court of arbitration between them, or as an alkali to promote the blending of his oil with her water—he might have a new profile of Lenette. The old one cut out by Leibgeber (which the letter brought to his recollection), and which, as we may remember, Leibgeber let him have, happened to have been put into the pocket of his dressing-gown and sent to the wash with it (being of much the same colour, moreover). “It shall be put on the stocks to-night,” said Siebenkæs.

When the Schulrath was going, as he could see that the ring upon Lenette’s finger didn’t squeeze it so uncomfortably as it had done (and gave himself credit for having been the means of filing it smoother and padding it softer), he shook her hand with much warmth, and said—

“I shall always be delighted to come whenever there’s the slightest thing the matter with you two charming people.”

Lenette answered, “Oh yes, do come very often.”

And Siebenkæs added, “The oftener the better.”

And yet, when he had gone, the ring seemed to be not quite so comfortable again, and medical students who may be working at psychology may be a little surprised that during supper the advocate said very little to his wife, and she very little to him. The reason was that he had Leibgeber’s letter lying by his plate in the place where the bread normally is, and the image of his beloved friend shone bright before his mental vision from Bayreuth all athwart the far misty darkness between—their first happy meeting to come floated magically before him. Hope shot down a pure clearing ray into the dark mephitic cave where he was panting and toiling now—and the coming spring stood like some cathedral tower all hung with lamps lofty and bright in the distance, beaming through the dark night sky.

At length he “came to himself,” i. e. to his wife; the strong image of Leibgeber had buoyed him up from the sharp stones which strewed the present; the dear old friend, who had clipped out the bride’s profile up in the choir on the wedding-day, and been with them in the early weeks of their honeymoon, seemed to fling a chain of flower-wreaths about him and draw him closer to the silent form by his side. “Well darling, and how are you getting on?” he said, awaking from his reverie and taking her hand, now that all was peace again between them. She had, however, the feminine peculiarity or foible, habit at all events, of being much quicker to show that she was vexed than that her anger was over; of, at all events, being slow to show the latter; and of commencing a reconsideration of all the matters in dispute at the very moment that amends have been made and accepted, and pardon begged and granted. There are very few married women indeed who will put their hand into their husbands’, and say “There, I’m good again,” without a very considerable hesitation and delay; unmarried women are much more ready to do it. Wendeline did hold hers out, but did it too coldly, and drew it away again in a great hurry, to take up the table-cloth, which she asked him to help her to smooth and fold up. He did this smilingly—she gravely giving her whole attention to the process of folding the long white parallelogram into exact squares—and at length, when the last and thickest square was arrived at, he held it fast there—she pulled, trying to look very serious—he looked at her very fondly and tenderly—she couldn’t help smiling at this and then he took the tablecloth from her, pressed it and himself with it to her heart, and said, in her arms, “Little thief! how can you be so naughty to your old ragamuffin of a Siebenkæs, or whatever his name may be?” And now the rainbow of a brighter future appeared shining above the fast ebbing flood which had risen as high as their hearts so lately—But, my dears, rainbows now-a-days very often mean just the reverse of what the first was said to signify.

The prize he awarded to his queen of the rose-feast of the heart was to ask her to let him take a profile of her pretty face, that Peltzstiefel might find a joy and a present waiting for him on the morrow. I think I shall just trace an outline of his outline-tracing for people of taste in this place; but I must stipulate that nobody is to expect a pen to be a painter’s brush—or a painter’s brush to be an engraver’s style—or an engraver’s style a flower anther, generating generation upon generation of lilies and roses.

The advocate borrowed a drawing-board, viz. the façade of a new pigeon-house, from Fecht the cobbler. Lenette’s shoulder fitted into the oval portal of it as a clasp-knife does into its handle; a sheet of white paper was tacked on to the board—her pretty, soft head was pressed on the stiff paper—he applied, with much care and self restraint, his pencil at the upper part of the brow, difficult as it was to catch the shadow in such immediate proximity to the reality—and went slowly down the beautiful, flowery declivity all roses and lilies. But little or nothing came of it; the back part of the head was pretty good. His eyes would keep turning away from his work to the sitter, so that he drew as vilely as a box-painter.

“Wendeline, your head isn’t still a moment,” he said. And indeed her face, an well as her brain-fibres, shook by reason of the heightened beat of her pulse and the quickening of her breathing; while, on the other hand, his pencil stumbled when it came to the delicate basso relievo of her little nose, fell into the cleft at her lips, and stranded on the shoal of her chin. He kissed those lips which he couldn’t draw, and which she always had either too much open or too tightly closed, and brought a shaving-glass and said, “See, haven’t you got more faces than Janus, or any Indian god? The Schulrath will think you were making faces, and I copying them. Look, here’s where you moved, and I sprung after you like a chamois; the effect of the jump is, that the upper part of the face sticks out before the lower like a half mask. Just think how the Schulrath will stare in the morning.”

“Try once more, dear; I’ll do just as you tell me; I should like it to be very nice,” Lenette said, blushing; and stiffened her neck, and steadied her soft cheek against the drawing-board. And as her husband gently glided his drawing ovipositor over her brow like a segment of some white hemisphere—instead of breathing, he found she was holding her breath this time till she shook again, and till the colour came to her face.

And here jealousy, like some exploding fire-ship, sent hard fragments of the wreck of his shattered happiness crashing on a sudden against his heart.

“Ah!” (he thought) “can it be that she does really love him?” (i. e. the Schulrath).

His pencil stood still in the obtuse angle between her nose and her chin as if under a spell; he heard her let go her pent-up breath; his pencil made black zigzags at the edge of the paper, and as he stopped at the closed lips, which nothing warmer than his own, and her morning prayers, had ever touched, and thought “Must this come upon me too? must this joy be taken from me like all the rest? And am I drawing up my bill of divorce and Uriah-letter here with my own very hands?” He could do no more at it. He took the drawing-board quickly from her shoulder—fell upon her closed lips—kissed away the pent-up sigh—pressed the life out of his jealousy between his heart and hers, and said—

“I can’t do it till to-morrow, Lenette! Don’t be vexed, darling! Tell me, are you quite as you used to be in Augspurg? Don’t you understand me? Have you not the slightest idea what I am driving at?”

She answered quite innocently, “Now you will be annoyed, Firmian, I know, but I really have not the slightest idea.”

Then the Goddess of Peace took from the God of Sleep his poppy garland, and twined it into her own olive wreath and led the wedded pair, garlanded and reconciled, hand in hand into the glittering, gleaming, icefields of the land of dreams—the magic shadowy background of the noisy jarring, shifting day—our camera obscura full of moving miniature pictures of a world all dwarfed, in which man, like the Creator, dwells alone with his own creations.

END OF THE PREFACE AND OF THE FIRST BOOK.

The reader will remember that, at the beginning of the preface, I stated that I succeeded in putting the old merchant into a sweet sleep, and in providing his daughter with a gladsome feast of tabernacles, in the shape of the young unopened buds of this, my little cottage-garden here. But the foul fiend knows how to breeze up a sudden rain squall, and let it splattering down upon all our loveliest fireworks. I was only performing a duty in converting myself into a small, pocket circulating library for a poor lonely thing of a girl, whose father gave her no chance of a word or two of rational conversation except with her parrot, and with the family lawyer aforesaid.

The cage of the former was placed near her inkstand and waste-book; and he acquired from his mistress as much in the shape of German-Italian as a bookkeeper finds necessary for carrying on his foreign correspondence. And a parrot being always incited to talkativeness by a looking-glass in his cage, he and his language-mistress were enabled to look at themselves in it together. The latter (the family lawyer) I myself was. But the Captain—for fear of seductive princess-kidnappers and pirates such as me, and because her mother was dead, and because she was useful in the business—would let her speak to no man whomsoever, except in the presence of a third party (viz., himself). So that it was very seldom any man came to the house, except me; whereas, a father generally decoys whole museums of insects into his house by means of a blooming daughter, just as a cherry-tree in blossom near a window fills a room with wasps and bees. It wasn’t exactly everybody who, when he wanted to speak a rational word with her (i. e. one her father shouldn’t hear), could manage to draw the flute stop of his organ, and then play away for an hour to this Argus till he should close his hundred green eyes, so that two blue ones might be looked into. I did manage it, indeed; but the world shall hear what sort of a psalm of thanksgiving and vote of thanks I was treated to for my pains.

The old man—who had grown suspicious on account of the length of time I had remained the evening before—had this evening only pretended to be asleep, that he might see what I was going to be at. The rapidity with which he went asleep (the reader no doubt remembers it at the beginning of the book) ought to have struck me more than it did. I ought to have reckoned on a contrary state of matters myself, and been ready with more prefaces in addition to this present one, to serve as sleeping powders.

The rascally eavesdropper lay in wait till I had made my report on the two Flower-pieces and the four first chapters of this book. At the end of the fourth he bounced up as a mole-trap does when one walks on it, and addressed me from behind with the following harangue of congratulation—“Has the devil got you by the coat-tails? You must come here from Berlin, must you, and stuff my daughter’s head with all sorts of atheistical, nonsensical, romantic balderdash and nonsense, till she’ll be of no more use in a shop than——”

“Just listen to one word, Herr Pigtail!” said I quite quietly, taking him into the next room, where there was neither fire nor light; “just listen to one single, half-word!”

I put my hands upon his shoulders, and said, “Herr Pigtail—for in Charles the Great’s time every officer was so styled, because in those days the soldiers wore tails, as the women do now—Herr Pigtail, I’m not going to have a tussle with you to-night, when the old year’s going out and the new year’s coming in. I assure you solemnly that I am the son of the ——,[^[32]] and that I shall never see you more, though you shall have all the Vienna letters just the same. But I implore you, for God’s sake, to allow your daughter to read. Now-a-days every tradesman reads—one of whom will be her husband—and every tradesman’s wife. Yet for all this reading, there’s still plenty of spinning and cooking going on; there are shirts in plenty, and fat people in abundance. And as for corrupting her—why! that’s just what a man who reads will find it most difficult to accomplish in the case of a woman who reads, and most easy in the case of one who hardly knows her A B C. Let me entreat you, Captain.”

“If you would but just mind your own affairs! What’s the girl to you?” was his reply. It was a true harbour of refuge for me that, on neither of these two evenings, the Christmas Eve or the New Year’s, had I, in the enthusiasm of narration, so much as touched anything of the daughter’s but about a groschen’s worth of hair (and that not her own), which got among my fingers somehow or other, I hardly know how.

It would have been little to have seized her hands, in the fervour of my biographical enthusiasm it would have been nothing at all; but, as I have said, I hadn’t done it. I had said to myself, “Enjoy a pretty face as you would a picture, and a female voice as you would a nightingale’s, and don’t touch the picture or throttle the bird. What! must every tulip be out up for salad, and all altar-cloths made into camisoles?”

Of all truths, the one which we bring ourselves to credit last of all is that there are certain men whom no amount of truth will convince. That Herr Pigtail was one of these presently occurred to me, not so soon as it ought to have done, and I determined that the only sermon I should preach, to him would be of the jocular and middle-age-Easter kind.[^[33]] “Not so loud, Herr Pigtail, or mademoiselle will hear every syllable; you have pinned her, poor butterfly, into your letter book; but at the great day of judgment I shall accuse you of not having given her my works to read. I do wish you had only gone on pretending to be asleep long enough to allow me to tell her the other books of the history of Kuhschnappel, where Siebenkæs’s troubles occur, and his death, and his marriage. But, mademoiselle, I shall tell my publisher in Berlin to send you the remaining books of the story the moment they are in print, fresh out of the press, still all damp, like a morning newspaper. And now, adieu, Herr Pigtail; may Heaven grant you a new heart with the new year, and your dear daughter a second heart inside her own.”

The elemental conflict of his and my dissimilar components raged louder and louder: but I say no more about it—every additional word would have the appearance of an act of vindictiveness. This, however, I may at all events say: happy is every daughter who may read my works while her father is awake (very few such daughters, however, recognise this truth). Unhappy is every dependent of an Oehrmann, because he will be starved, as a greyhound is, that he may be the more nimble at running (I do not mean on the piano with his fingers), as the dancers’ children get nothing to eat that they may spring the better! And fortunate are all needy persons who have nothing to do with him; because Jacob Oehrmann gives to everyone just as much moral, as he possesses mercantile, credit, to which recruit-measure of worth he has been habituated by his fellow-tradesmen, who measure each other with yard-measures of metal. The only people who find favour in his sight are those who are complete paupers, and this because they serve as pedestals for his charity; for the alms which he distributes in the name of the town and out of its exchequer, he looks upon as his own. Peace be with him! At that time I had not taken a part myself in celebrating the peace-festival of the soul which I have described in the Fruit-piece of this book, and I had read but little of what I have there written concerning the year of Jubilee which ought to last as long as the Long Parliament in our hearts with respect to all our moral debtors; for if I had I should not even have contradicted Herr Pigtail.

I vexed him, I am sorry to say, once more by my parting speech to his daughter (for I wished him and her my wishes both together and at once, so that it might not appear which was for which).

“Herr Pigtail, and mademoiselle, I bid you a long farewell. No more shall I be able, in elysian evenings, to relate to you any of my biographies (shorn of the digressions); and the feast days and the holidays, as well as the eves thereof, will come and will go, but he who has caused you such vivid emotions will come no more. May fate send thee books instead of bookmakers, sometimes stir thy dull heart with a poetic throb, heave thy still breast with tender sighs prophetic of the future—bring to thy eyes some gentle tear drops, such as an andante causes to flow, and lead thee on through the hot, toilsome summer days, not to an after summer, but to a flowery tuneful spring. And so, good night.”

It goes to my heart to part with people; even were it my sworn hereditary foe: one is going to see him no more. Pauline was anything but my sworn hereditary foe. Out in the streets there were more new year well-wishers going their rounds, the watchmen, who were giving utterance to their good wishes in wind instrumental music and miserable verse. Stiff, old-fashioned, rude verses always touch me more—particularly in an appropriate mouth—than your sapless, new poems, all tricked out with artificial flowers and ice-plants; poetry altogether wretched is better than the mediocre. I decided upon going through the town gate; my heart was filled with emotions of very different kinds—for you see it was only eleven o’clock and the cold night was full of stars. And it was the last night of the year, and I didn’t want to pass from the old year to the new in sleep, though that is how I would pass from this life to the next. I resolved to take that flushed, throbbing heart of mine out of the streets, and to a quieter company.

Place a man in some waste Sahara desert stretching further than the eye can reach, and afterwards pen him up into the narrowest of corners, he will be struck, in both cases, by the same vivid consciousness of his own individuality—the widest spaces and the narrowest have the same powerful effect in quickening our perception of our own Ego and of its relationship. There is nothing, on the whole, oftener forgotten than that which is what forgets—namely, the forgetter’s self. Not only do the mechanical employments of labour and trade always draw men out of themselves, but the mental effort of study and investigation, also, renders scholars and philosophers just as deaf and blind to their own Ego, and its position with respect to other entities—deafer and blinder even. Nothing is more difficult than to convert an object of contemplation (which we always move away to a certain distance from ourselves, and from the mind’s eye, so as to bring the latter to bear on it properly) into an object of sensation, and to feel that the object is the eye itself. I have often read whole books on the subject of the Ego, and of printing, right through, until at last I saw, to my astonishment, that the Ego and the printed letters were before—me so to speak under my nose.

Let the reader say truly: has he not even at this moment, while I have been talking, been forgetting that there are letters before him, ay, and his own Ego into the bargain?

But out where I was, under the twinkling heavens, and on a snow-covered height, round about which there gleamed a white, frozen plain, my Ego burst away from its relationships (while in connection with them it was no more than an attribute, a quality), and it became a personage—a separate entity. And then I could look upon myself. All marked points of time—stanzas as it were, or music phrases, of existence—new years’ days for example, and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above the waves which are round him; he clears the water from his eyes, and looks about him, and says—“How the current has been carrying me along, drowning my hearing, and blinding my sight! Those are the waves, down there, onward, which have been bearing me along, and these, now coming toward me, when I dip down among them, will whirl me away!”

Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one’s Ego, there can be no freedom, and no calm equanimity amid the crowding elbowing tumult of the world.

I shall go on with my story. I stood upon an iceberg, but my soul was all aglow—the cloven moon shone brightly down, and the shadows of the pine-trees about me lay, like dismembered limbs of the night, black upon the lily ground of snow. Away, some distance from me, a man seemed to be kneeling motionless on the ground.

And now 12 o’clock struck, and 1794, year of war and tumult, fell, with all its rivers of blood, into the ocean of eternity; the booming after-tone of the bell seemed to say to me, “Now has Destiny, with the twelfth stroke of her hammer, knocked down the old year to you, poor perishing mortals, at her auction of minutes.”

The kneeling man now stood up and went quickly away. I could long see him and his shadow disappearing in the moonlight.

I left my height, the boundary hill between two years, and went down to where the man had been kneeling. I found a crucifix and a black leather prayer-book in duodecimo, all thumbed yellow, except one leaf at the beginning on which was the name of the owner, whose knees had worn deep traces in the ice. I knew him well, he was a cottager whose two sons had had to go to the war. On looking more closely, I found he had drawn a circle in the snow, to keep off evil spirits.

I saw it all; the simple, weak-minded creature, whose soul was darkened by a perpetual annular eclipse, had gone there on this solemn night to hearken to the hollow distant muttering thunder of the coming storm, and laid his prostrate soul, as it were, upon the earth to hear the distant march of the approaching foe. “Shallow, timid soul,” thought I, “why should the dead that are to be come floating athwart the face of the clear, still night—thy sleeping sons among them, memberless? Why strive already to see the darting flames of conflagrations yet to come, and to hear the dismal turmoil, the bitter wail, of a woe as yet unborn? The coffins of the coming year have, as in times of pestilence, no inscriptions yet—why should the names appear upon them? Oh! thy Solomon’s ring has been no protection against the destroying angel who dwells within our breasts. And that vague, ugly giant-cloud, behind which are death and the future, will prove, on approach, to be death and the future itself.”

In hours like these we are all ready to lay our hats and swords on to the bier—ay, and ourselves as well—our old wounds burn anew, and our hearts, not being truly healed, a little thing breaks them again, like arms imperfectly set. But the cruel, piercing lightning flash of some great minute, the reflection of which stretches gleaming athwart the whole river of our life, is necessary to us to make us blind to the ignes fatui and glowworms which meet us, to guide us, every hour: and frivolous, giddy man needs some powerful shock to counteract his tendency to continual petty naggling. Therefore, to us little crustaceans sticking with our suckers upon the ship of this earth, every new year’s night is, like night in the old mythologies, a mother of many gods in us—and in such a night there begins for us a better normal year than that which began in 1624. And I felt as if I should kneel, humble and penitent, on the spot where the poor childless father had knelt.

But now a brisker air brought to my ears a burst of gladsome music; it came like the breath of flowers across the frozen plain, horns and trumpets on the church tower, sending their cheering harmonies over the sleeping earth, ushering, with glad vigorous tones, the first hour of the new year in to a world of anxious, doubting men. And I too grew glad and strong; I raised my glance from the white shroud of the coming spring, and gazed at the moon; and on these spots on her face (these spots which grow green as you approach) I saw our earthly spring reposing upon flowers, and already moving his young wings, soon to take his flight with other birds of passage, and, bright with glittering plumes, and hailed by skylarks’ anthems, come and alight upon our shores.

The distant new year’s music flowed around me still I felt much happier, and far more tender; I saw the coming sorrows in the new born year, but they wore such lovely masks that they were more like sorrows that are past, or like the music around me—just as the rain which falls through the great caverns in the Derbyshire hills sounds in the distance like music.

But when I looked around me, and saw the white earth shining like a white sun, and the silent deep blue sphere all round, like a household circle of one great family—and as the music, like lovelier sighs, accompanied my thoughts—as I fixed my gaze, with grateful heart, upon the starry sky where all these thousands of stedfast witnesses of the beautiful moments (moments faded, out of bloom, indeed, now—but the great Beneficence spreads their seed for evermore)—when I thought of the men asleep all around me, and wished that they might all be happier when they opened their eyes in the morning—and when I thought of those awake UNDER me, whose slumbering souls stood in need of such a wish,—my heart, oppressed by the music, and by the night, grew heavy and grew full, and the blue sky, the glittering moon, and the sparkling snow-height all melted into one great floating shimmer.

And in the shimmer, and amid the music, I heard voices of my friends, and dear fellow-creatures, tenderly and anxiously wishing their new year’s wishes. They touched my heart so deeply, that I could but barely think my own—

“Oh! may you all be happy all the years of your lives.”

END OF BOOK I.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH BOOKS.

It has often been a source of much annoyance to me that to every preface I write I am obliged to append a book—like the endorsement on a bill of exchange—or an appendix to letters A to Z. Many a man who dabbles in authorship by way of amusement has his books sent to him all ready written and complete, straight from the cradle; so that all he has to do is to attach his gold frontlets of prefaces to their foreheads—which is nothing but painting the corona about the sun. As yet, however, not a single author has applied to me for a preamble to a book, although for several years I have had a considerable number of prefaces by me (all ready beforehand, and going at great bargains), in which I extol to the best of my ability works which have not as yet come in to being. In fact, I have now a perfect museum of these prize medals and commemoration medals of other people’s cleverness at the service of anyone who may stand in need of them; they are all made by the very finest of mint-machinery, and my collection of them is increasing day by day; so that I shall be obliged to sell it off wholesale before very long (I don’t see what else I can do), and bring out a book—consisting of nothing but pre-existent prefaces.

They will still be obtainable singly, however, until the Easter fair, and authors who make early application can have the entire fascicle of preludes forwarded to them, so that they can pick out for themselves whichever preface seems to them the most laudatory of a book. After the Easter fair however, when the Book of Prefaces above mentioned comes out (and it will be interleaved with the fair catalogue), the literary world will only be beglorified in corpore, in coro, and I shall be (so to speak) making a present of a patent of nobility to the republic of letters in the lump,—as the Empress Queen did in 1775 to the whole mercantile community of Vienna; although I have before my eyes (in the shape of the poor reviewers who work themselves well nigh to death, hammering and building away at the temple of fame, and at triumphal arches) the melancholy proof that though a man were to extol the republic of letters even in six volumes folio, he would get less for it than Sannazaro did for belauding the republic of Venice in as many lines—for each line in the latter case brought the poet in a matter of a hundred five-dollar pieces.

I propose to interstratify one of the prefaces in question in this place by way of a specimen and experiment, making as if its celebrated author had written it to order for this book (which is the actual truth, moreover). There is no difficulty in my splitting myself up into two characters, the flower painter and the preface maker. But,—as one cannot quite lose sight of feelings of becoming modesty—I carefully pick out the most miserable specimen of the lot, one in which laudation occurs but to a very moderate extent, one which places the author of the book attached to it upon a funeral car, rather than upon a triumphal one, with nothing whatever to draw it along moreover; whereas the other prefaces harness posterity to them, and the reading public are, by them, yoked on to the heavenly chariot, the Elijah’s chariot, of Immortality, in which they draw the author along.

In conclusion, then, I have only to observe that the celebrated author of ‘Hesperus’ has been kind enough to look through my Flower-pieces, and contribute to them the following preface, which will be found well worthy of perusal.

PREFACE, BY THE AUTHOR OF ‘HESPERUS.’

The following remarks may be thrown into the form of a series of postulates, which are, at the same time, so many similes.

Many authors (Young is an instance) set fire to their nerve-spirit, which, like burning spirit of another kind (brandy), tinges every person who stands round the inkbottle where it is flaring with a sham DEADLY pallor. But, unfortunately, each looks only at the others, none looks into the mirror. The effect of the proximity of this universal mortality all about, upon people and authors, is that each is impressed with a livelier sense of the exceptional nature of his own immortality; and this is remarkably comforting to us all.

The consequence is, as it seems to me, very plain. Poets, living in fifth, or fiftieth floors, may make poems, but not marriages; neither may they keep, nor establish, houses. Canaries’ breeding cages have to be more roomy than their singing cages.

If this be so, then, what does the author’s pen do? Like a child’s, it traces in ink the characters which nature has faintly marked in the reader with pencil.

The author’s strings only vibrate in unison with the reader’s octaves, fifths, fourths, and thirds—not with his seconds or sevenths. Unsympathetic readers do not become sympathetic ones; it is only the cognate, or congruent, sort which rise to the author’s level or pass beyond it.

And with this stands or falls my fourth postulate. The iron shoe of Pegasus is the armature of the magnet of truth, increasing its power of attraction; yet we are hungry birds, and fly at the poet’s grapes as though they were real ones, thinking the boy a painted one, when we really ought to be frightened at him.

The transition from this to the fifth postulate is a self-evident matter. Man has such a high opinion of everything in the shape of antiquity, that he prolongs it, and keeps it alive, and lives according to it, though it be but the cover and the mask of the very poison which will destroy itself. There are two proofs of this proposition which I leave aside, of set purpose; the first is, Religion, which is all gnawed to worm dust; the second, Freedom, which is quite as much crumbled to powder as the other. In my capacity of a member of the Lutheran Church, I merely glance at the subject of relics (in support of the proposition)—relics, in the case of which, as Vasquez the Jesuit informs us, if they chance to be entirely eaten up of worms, we must continue to worship what remains—that is to say, the worms which have eaten them. Wherefore, meddle not with that nest of worms, the time in which thou livest, or it will eat thee up; a million of worms are quite equal to one dragon.

This must be admitted and assumed, at least if my sixth postulate is to have any sense in it which is,—that no man is wholly indifferent to, and unaffected by, every kind of truth; indeed even if it be only to poetical reflections (illusions) that he swears allegiance—inasmuch as he does even that he thereby does homage to truth; for in all poetry it is but the part which is true which goes to the heart (or head), just as in our passions and emotions nothing but the Moral produces effect. A reflection which should be nothing whatever but a reflection would necessarily, for that very reason, not be a reflection. Every semblance (meaning every thing which we see, or suppose we see) presupposes the existence of light somewhere, and is itself light, only in an enfeebled or reflected condition. Only, most people in our, not so much enlightened as enlightening times, are like nocturnal insects who avoid, or are pained by, the light of day, but, in the night, fly to every nocturnal light, every phosphorescent surface.

The graves of the best men are like those of the Moravians, level and flat, and this earthly sphere of ours is a Westminster Abbey of such levellings and flattenings—ah! what innumerable drops of tears as well as blood (which are what the three grand trees of this world—the trees of Life, of Knowledge, and Liberty—are watered with) have been shed, but never counted. History, in painting the human race, does not follow the example of that painter who, making a portrait of a one-eyed king, drew only his seeing profile; what history paints is the blind side, and it needs some grand calamity to bring great men to light—as comets are seen during total eclipses of the sun. Not upon the battle-field only—upon the holy ground of virtue also, and upon the classic soil of truth—the pedestal whereon history raises on high some single hero whose name rings in all men’s ears has to be composed and built up of thousands of other heroes who have fought and fallen, nameless and unknown. The noblest deeds of heroism are done within four walls, not before the public gaze,—and as history keeps record only of the men sacrificed, and, on the whole, writes only in spilt blood, doubtless our annals are grander and more beautiful in the eyes of the all-pervading spirit of the universe than in those of the history-writer; the great scenes of history are estimated according to the numbers of angels or devils on the stage, the men not being taken into account.

These are the grounds on which I rely when I assert with a good deal of boldness that when we inhale the perfume of the full-blown blossoms of joy with too deep and strong an inhalation, without having first given them a good shake, we run the risk of snuffing up some tormenting insect (before we know what we are about) through the ethmoid into the brain;[^[34]] and who—tell me if you can—is to get it out again? Whereas little or nothing of a risky sort can be snuffed up out of Flower-pieces, and their painted calices, since painted worms remain where they are.

This, then, is what I have to postulate by means of similes. What the public postulates, or demands, is my opinion of these Flower-pieces. The author is a promising youth of five years of age;[^[35]] he and I have been friends since childhood, and, I think, can assert that we have but one soul between us, as Aristotle says should be the case with friends. He gets me to read over everything he thinks of publishing, and to give him my opinion and advice. And, as I returned these Flower-pieces to him with the warmest (and, at the same time, sincerest) expression of my approval, he has requested me to make my verdict somewhat more widely known, believing as he does (rather too flatteringly perhaps) that it may carry a certain amount of weight with it, more especially as it is an impartial verdict, and, as such, one which can be placed in the hands of the critics as a species of ruler wherewith to draw the lines upon which their verdicts may be written.

In this, however, he goes a little too far. All I can say is that the work is written quite as if I had done it myself. There is no greater amount of dynamic ornamentation in it than is usual in books, and, happy as the author would have been to have thundered, stormed, and poured in it, there was of course no room in a parish advocate’s lodgings for Rhine cataracts, thunderstorms, tropical hurricanes (of tropes) or waterspouts, and he has had to reserve his more terrific tornadoes for a future work. I have his permission to mention the name of this future work; it is the ‘Titan.’ In this work he means to be an absolute Hecla, and shatter the ice of his country (and himself into the bargain) to pieces; like the volcanoes in Iceland, he will spout up a column of boiling water four feet in diameter to a height of eighty-nine or ninety feet in the air, and that at such a temperature that when this wet fire pillar falls down again and flows into the book shops, it will still be warm enough to boil eggs hard or their mother soft. “Then” (he always says—very sadly however—because he sees what a hard matter it is to distinguish between full half of our battling and harrying here below and a Jack Pudding farce and piece of utter buffoonery and nonsense,—also, that the cradle of this life rocks us, and stills us indeed, but carries us not a step on our way)—“then may the Arbor Toxicaria Macassariensis[^[36]] of the Ideal, beneath which I have lost a little hair already, go on poisoning me, and dispatch me to the Land of the Ideal. At all events, I have knelt down and prayed under the solemnising soul-elevating sighing roar of its death-dealing branches. And why should there be a hut made ready for the traveller beside the eternal well of truth, marked with the title ‘Travellers’ REST,’ if no one ever enters it?” He wants, by way of broad “flies” for his life stage on earth, merely a regular, downright, rainy year or two (two will suffice); for a broad, bright, open sky overpowers us, and weakens the hand’s pen power by making the eyes over full. And here the book-maker differs markedly from his provision-contractor, the papermaker, who shuts his mill up precisely when the weather is wet.

I should also be glad if readers would have the goodness to go once more through the few chapters composing the first book—that they may see what they really lack; and indeed a book which is not worth reading twice is not worth reading once.

In conclusion, I (albeit the most inconsiderable clubbist and vote-possessor of all the public) would fain incite the author to the production of other seedlings, suckers, and infantas of the same stamp, trusting that the reading world may form its opinion on his work with the same careful favour and indulgent approval as I have formed mine.

Jean Paul Fr. Richter.

Hof in Voigtland,
June 5th, 1796.

Thus far my friend’s preface. Utterly absurd as it is, my own preface, you see, has got to be concluded too, and at the end of it I can but sign myself as my aforesaid man Friday and namesake does, videlicet,

Jean Paul Fr. Richter.

Hof in Voigtland,
June 5th, 1796.

BOOK II.

CHAPTER V.

THE BROOM AND THE BESOM AS PASSION IMPLEMENTS—THE IMPORTANCE OF A BOOKWRITER—DIPLOMATIC NEGOTIATIONS AND DISCUSSIONS ON THE SUBJECT OF CANDLE SNUFFING—THE PEWTER CUPBOARD—DOMESTIC HARDSHIPS AND ENJOYMENTS.

Catholics hold that there were fifteen mysteries in the life of Christ—five of Joy, five of Woe, five of Glory. I have carefully accompanied our hero through the five joyful mysteries of which the Linden honey-month of his marriage has had to tell. I now come with him to the five mysteries of Woe with which the series of the mysteries of most marriages is—concluded. I trust, however, that his may yet be found to contain the five of Glory also.

In my first edition, I began this book of my hero’s story in an unconcerned manner, with the above sentence just as if it were literally correct. A second, and carefully revised edition, however, renders it incumbent upon me to add, as an emendation, that the fifteen mysteries in question do not come one after another, like steps of stairs, or ancestors in a pedigree, but are shuffled up together like good and bad cards in a hand. Yet, in spite of this shuffling, the joy outbalances the sorrow, at any rate in its duration, as has been the case, indeed, with this terrestrial globe, our planet itself, which has survived several last days, and as a consequence still more springs, that is to say, re-creations on a smaller scale. I mention all this to save a number of poor devils of readers from the dreadful thought that they have got to wade through a whole “Book II.” full of tears, partly to be read about, partly to be shed out of compassion. I am not one of those authors who, like very rattlesnakes, can sit and gaze upon thousands of charmed people running up and down, a prey to every kind of agitation, suspense, and anxiety, till his time comes to spring upon them and swallow them up.

When Siebenkæs awoke in the morning, he at once packed the devil of jealousy, the marriage devil, off to the place where all other devils dwell. For a calming sleep lowers the pulse of the soul’s fever—the grains thereof are fever-bark for the cold fever of hate, and also for the hot fever of love. Indeed he put down the tracing board, and with a pantograph made a correct, reduced copy of his yesterday’s free translation of the Engelkrautian countenance, and blackened it nicely. When it was done, he said to his wife, for very love of her, “We’ll send him the profile this morning, at once. It may be a good long while before he comes to fetch it.” “Oh yes! he won’t be here till Wednesday, and by that time he’ll have forgotten all about it.” “But I could bring him here sooner than that,” Siebenkæs answered; “I need only send him the Russian Trinity dollar of 1679 to get changed for me; he won’t send me a farthing of the money he’ll bring it himself as he always has done all through Leibgeber’s collection.” “Or you might send him the dollar and the picture both,” said Lenette, “he would like it better.” “Which would he like better?” he asked. She didn’t see exactly what answer to make to this ridiculous question (whether she meant the stamped face or the pictured one) sprung upon her like a mine in this sort of way, and got out of her difficulty by saying, “Well, the things, of course.” He spared her any further catechising.

The Schulrath, however, sent nothing but an answer to the effect that he was beside himself with delight at the charming presents, and would come to express his thanks in person, and to settle up with the advocate, by the end of the following week at latest. The little dash of bitter flavour which was perceptible to the taste in this unexpected answer of the too happy Schulrath, was by no means sweetened away by the arrival at this moment of the messenger of the Inheritance Office, with Heimlicher von Blaise’s first proceedings in the matter of the plaint lodged against him, consisting of a petition for three weeks’ grace within which to lodge answers, a delay which the Court had readily accorded. Siebenkæs, as his own poor’s advocate, lived in the sure and certain hope that the promised land of inheritance, flowing with milk and honey, would be reached by his children, though he would in all probability have long ere that time perched in the wilderness of the law; for justice is given to recompensing the children, and the children’s children, for the uprightness of the fathers, and for the goodness of their cause. It was more or less in convenient, at the same time, to have nothing to live upon during one’s own lifetime. The Russian Trinity dollar—for which the Schulrath hadn’t even paid as yet—couldn’t be lived upon, and there were but one or two queue ducats remaining of the treasury chest provided by Leibgeber, for the carrying on of operations against the Heimlicher. This gold coin and those few silver ones were (although I have said nothing about it till now) the entire money contents remaining in the Leibgeberian saviour’s scrip, and indeed none but a true disciple and follower of the Saviour could be expected to hold out upon them. My silence on this matter of the emptying of the coin cabinet may perhaps be accepted in evidence of the fact that I try as much as I can to avoid mentioning anything calculated to give my readers pain.

“Oh! I shall get on somehow or other,” said Siebenkæs quite gleefully, as he set to work harder than ever at his writing, with the view of getting a considerable haul of money into the house, at the earliest moment possible, in the shape of payment for his ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers.’

But there was a fresh purgatorial fire now being stoked and blown, till it blazed hotter and hotter about him. I have refrained from saying anything about the fire in question till now, though he has been sitting roasting at it since the day before yesterday, Lenette being the cook, and his writing table the larkspit.

During the few days when the wordless quarrel was going on, he had got into a habit of listening with the closest attention to what Lenette was doing, as he sat writing away at his ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers’; and this sent his ideas all astray. The softest step, the very slightest shake of anything affected him just as if he had had hydrophobia, or the gout, and put one or two fine young ideas to death, as a louder noise kills young canaries, or silkworms.

He controlled himself very well at first. He pointed out to himself that his wife really could not help moving about, and that as long as she hadn’t a spiritual or glorified body and furniture to deal with, she couldn’t possibly go about as silently as a sunbeam, or as her invisible good and evil angels behind her. But while he was listening to this cours de morale, this collegium pietatis of his own, he lost the run of his satirical conceits and contexts, and his language was deprived of a good deal of its sparkle.

But the morning after the silhouette evening, when their hearts had shaken hands and renewed the old royal alliance of Love, he could go much more openly to work, and so, as soon as he had blackened the profile, and had only his own original creations to go on blackening—i. e. when he was going to begin working in his own charcoal burning hut, he said to his wife, as a preliminary—

“If you can help it, Lenette, don’t make very much noise to-day. I really can hardly get on with my writing, if you do—you know it’s for publication.”

She said “I’m sure you can’t hear me—I go about so very quietly.”

Although a man may be long past the years of his youthful follies, yet in every year of his life there crop up a few weeks and days in which he has fresh follies to commit. It was truly in a moment of one of these days that Siebenkæs made the request above mentioned; for he had now laid upon himself the necessity of lying in wait and watching to see what Lenette would do in consequence of it. She skimmed over the floor, and athwart the various webs of her household labours, with the tread of a spider. Like her sex in general, she had disputed his little point, merely for the sake of disputing it, not of doing what she was asked not to do. Siebenkæs had to keep his ears very much on the alert to hear what little noise she did make, either with her hands or her feet—but he was successful, and did hear the greater part of it. Unless when we are asleep we are more attentive to a slight noise than to a loud one; and our author listened to her wherever she went, his ear and his attention going about fixed to her like a pedometer wherever she moved. In short he had to break off in the middle of the satire, called “The Nobleman with the Ague,” and jump up and cry to her (as she went creeping about), “For one whole hour have I been listening and watching that dreadful tripping about on tiptoe. I had much rather you would stamp about in a pair of the iron-soled sandals people used to wear for beating time in.[^[37]] Please go about as you usually do, darling.”

She complied, and went about almost as she usually did. He would have very much liked to have prohibited the intermediate style of walking, as he had the light and the heavy; but a husband doesn’t care to contradict himself twice in one morning; once is enough. In the evening he asked her if she would mind going about the house in her stockings when he was at work at his writing. She would find it nice and cool for the feet. “In fact,” he added, “as I’m working all the forenoon literally for our bread, it would be well if you would do nothing that isn’t absolutely necessary while I am at my literary work.”

Next morning he sat in judgment (mentally) upon everything that went on behind his back, and challenged it to see if it could produce the free-pass of necessity—going on with his writing all the time, but doing it worse than usual. This scribbling martyr endured a great many things with as much patience as he could muster, but when Wendeline took to whisking the straw under the green painted marriage TORUS with a long broom, the cross grew too heavy for his shoulder. It happened, moreover, that he had been reading two days before in an old Ephemeris of scientific inquirers, that a clergyman, of the name of Johann Pechmann, couldn’t bear the sound of a besom—that it nearly took his breath away, and that he once took to his heels and bolted when a crossing sweeper accidentally ran against him. The effect of his having read this was, that he was involuntarily more observant and intolerant of a cognate discomfort. He called out to the domestic sweeper in the next room, from his chair where he sat—

“Lenette, do not go on scrubbing and switching about with that besom of yours, it drives away the whole of my best ideas out of my head. There was an old clergyman once of the name of Pechmann, who would rather have been condemned to sweep a crossing in Vienna himself, than to listen to another sweeping it—he would rather have been flogged with a birch-broom, than have heard the infernal sound of it swishing and whishing. How is a man to get a coherent idea, fit to go to the printer and publisher, into his head with all this sweeping and scrubbing going on?”

Lenette did what every good wife, and her lap dog, would have done; she left off the noise by degrees. At last she laid down the besom, and merely whisked three straws and a little feather fluff gently with the hair-broom, from under the bed, not making as much noise even as he did with his writing. However the editor of the ‘Devil’s Papers’ managed to hear it, in a manner beyond his fondest hopes. He rose up, went to the bedroom door and called in at the room, “My darling, it’s every bit as hellish a torment to me if I can hear it at all. You may fan those miserable sweepings with a peacock’s feather, or a holy-water asperger, or you may puff them away with a pair of bellows, but I and my poor book must suffer and pay the piper all the same.”

“I’m quite done now, at all events,” she said.

He set to work again, and gaily took up the threads of his fourth satire, “Concerning the five Monsters and their receptacles, whereon I at first intended to subsist.”

Meanwhile Lenette gently closed the door, so that he was driven to the conclusion that there was something or other going on to annoy him again in his Gehenna and place of penitence. He laid down his pen and cried—

“Lenette, I can’t hear very distinctly what it is—but you’re up to something or other in there that I can not stand. For God’s dear sake, stop it at once, do put a period to my martyrdom and sorrows of Werther, for this one day—come here, let me see you.”

She answered, all out of breath with hard work—

“I’m not doing anything.”

He got up and opened the door of his chamber of torture. There was his wife rubbing away with a piece of grey flannel, polishing up the green rails of the bed. The author of this history once lay sick of smallpox in a bed of this kind, and knows them well. But the reader may not be aware that a green slumber cage of this kind is a good deal like a magnified canaries’ breeding cage with its latticed folding doors or portcullises, and that this trellis and hothouse for dreams is, though less handsome in appearance, much better for health than our heavy bastille towers all hung about with curtains which keep away every breath of fresh air. The advocate swallowed about half a pint of bedroom air, and said, in measured accents—

“You’re at your brushing and sweeping again, are you? although you know quite well that I’m sitting there working like a slave for you and myself too, and that I’ve been writing away for the last hour with scarcely an idea in my head. Oh! my heavenly better half! out with all your cartridges at one shot, for God’s sake, and don’t finish me off altogether with that rag of yours.”

Lenette, full of astonishment said, “It’s simply impossible, old man. that you can hear me in the next room”—and polished away harder than ever. He took her hand, somewhat hastily, though not roughly, and said in a louder tone, “Come, get up!—It’s exactly that which I complain of, that I can’t hear you in the next room; I’m obliged to rack my brains to guess what you’re at—and the only ideas left in my head are connected with brushing and scrubbing, so that all the brilliant notions which I might otherwise be putting down on paper are driven away. My darling child, nobody could possibly sit and work away here more composedly and contentedly than I, if it were only grape-shot and canister, howitzer shells, and hundred-pounders that you were banging away with at my back out of these embrasures of yours. What it is that I really can not stand, is a quiet noise.”

All this talk having put him a little out of temper, he fetched her out of the room, rag and all, saying—

“It does seem a little hard that, while I’m labouring away here with all my might, working myself almost to death, to provide a little entertainment for the reading public, a regular bear-baiting pit should be started in my own room, and that an author’s very bed should be turned into a siege-trench, and arrows and fire-balls sent about his ears out of it. There, I shan’t be writing while we’re at dinner, I’ll talk the thing out at full length with you then.”

At noon, then,[^[38]] as he was about to enter on the subject of the morning’s tourney, he had first to hold a prayer-tourney. I mean this: “prayers” do not, in Nürnberg and Kuhschnappel, mean a certain hereditary office and service of mass in a court chapel, but—the ringing of the twelve o’clock bell. Now the dining-table of our couple stood against the wall, and was not put in the middle of the floor except for meals. Well, Siebenkæs never succeeded above twice during his married life in having this table brought forward BEFORE the soup came in (for if a woman ONCE forgets a thing, she goes on forgetting it a thousand times running[^[39]]), though he preached his lungs as dry as a fox‘s (which are used for curing ours); both soup and table were always moved together, after the soup came in, without the spilling of a greater quantity of the latter than one might have used in swallowing a pill.

To-day this was the case as usual. Siebenkæs slowly chewed the pill which he swallowed with the soup. The delay in moving the table he observed anxiously (as if it had been a delay in the arrival of an equinox), with a long face and slow breathing, and when the soup-libation was duly poured as usual, he broke out as follows, in a calm tone of voice, however—

“The fact is, Lenette, we are on board a good ship. At sea, you know, people spill their soup because their vessel rolls and pitches—and ours is spilt for a similar reason. See here, the dinner-table and the morning besom are both in a tale together; they are two conspirators who will blow out your husband’s candle—to use a strong expression—before they have done.”

This, the exordium of his sermon, was followed by way of hymn, by the arrival of the town fool of Kuhschnappel, who brought in a great sheet of paper containing an invitation to the shooting match on St. Andrew’s Day, the 30th of November. Every one of us must, I am sure, have gathered from what has already been said that the only money left in the house was the queue-ducat. At the same time, Siebenkæs couldn’t leave the shooting-club, without thereby granting to himself a certificate of poverty, a testimonium paupertatis, in the face of the whole town. And really a shooting-ticket for this match was almost as good as mining shares or East India stock to a man who was as good a shot as Siebenkæs. It would also give him an opportunity of doing that public honour to his wife which she, as a senate clerk’s daughter from Augspurg, had a right to expect. Unfortunately, however, the grave man of folly couldn’t be got to give change for the curious queue-ducat, particularly as Siebenkæs aroused his suspicions with respect to it himself, by saying. “This is a very good tail or queue-ducat, I assure you. I don’t wear a tail myself,” he added, “but that’s no reason why a ducat shouldn’t, if the King of Prussia chooses to immortalise his own by having it stamped upon it. Wife, would you get our landlord, the hairdresser, to come up; nobody can know better than he whether it’s a queue-ducat or not, seeing he has queues (not upon ducats) in his hands every day.” The pickle-herring of Kuhschnappel didn’t vouchsafe the ghost of a smile at this. The hairdresser came, and declared it to be a queue, and civilly took it away himself to get it changed. Hairdressers can run; in five minutes he brought the change for the ducat.

When the melancholy buffoon had pocketed his portion of it, Lenette’s face was all over double interjections and marks of interrogation; wherefore Siebenkæs resumed his midday sermon. “The principal prizes,” he said, “are pewter dishes and sums of money for hitting the bird, and mostly provisions for the other marks we shoot at. I suspect that you and I shall dine on St. Andrew’s Day upon a nice piece of roast meat in a new dish, both of which I shall have shot into your kitchen, if I only take a little pains. And at all events don’t worry yourself, darling, because our money’s nearly all gone. Take refuge behind me. I am your sandbag, your gabion, your shelter trench, and with my rifle, more certainly still with my pen, I feel pretty sure I shall keep the devil of poverty at his distance, till my precious guardian hands over my mother’s property. Only for God’s sake don’t let your work interrupt mine. Your rag and your besom have cost me at least sixteen currency dollars this morning. For supposing I get eight imperial dollars a printed sheet for my Devilish Papers (counting the imperial dollar at ninety kreuzer)—and I ought, to get more—I should have earned forty-eight currency dollars this morning if I had written a (printed) sheet and a half. But you see I had to stop in the middle of it and expend a great many words upon you, for none of which I get a single kreuzer. You should look upon me as a fat old spider stowed away in a box to shrivel up in time into a precious gold nugget or jewel. Whenever I take a dip of ink I draw a thread of gold out of the ink bottle, as I’ve often told you, and (as the proverb says) the morning hours have gold in their mouths (Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund). Go on with your dinner, and listen. I’ll just take this opportunity of explaining to you the principal points in which the preciousness of an author consists, and so give you the key to a good many things. In Swabia, in Saxony, and Pomerania, there are towns in which there are people who appraise authors as our master butcher here does beef. They are usually known by the name of tasters or rulers of taste, because they try the flavour of every book as it comes out, and then tell the people whether they’ll like it or not. We authors in our irritation often call these people critics, but they might bring an action against us for libel for so doing. Now as these directors of taste seldom write books themselves, they have all the more time to read and find fault with other people’s. Yet it does sometimes happen that some of them have written bad books themselves, and consequently know a bad book in a moment when they come across one. Many become patron saints of authors and of their books for the same reason that St. John Nepomuck became the patron saint of bridges and those who cross them; because he was once thrown off one into the water. Now these scribblings of mine will be sent to these gentlemen as soon as they are in print (as your hymn-book is). And they’ll peer all through my productions to see whether or not I’ve written them quite legibly and distinctly (not too large or too small), whether I’ve put any wrong letters, a little e for a big, or an f instead of a ph, whether the hyphen-strokes are too long or too short, and all that sort of thing: indeed they often even give opinions about the thoughts in the book (which they have nothing to do with). Now you see, if you go on scrubbing and swishing about with besoms behind me, I shall keep writing all sorts of stuff and nonsense, and it’ll all be printed. Of course that’s a terrible thing to happen to a man, for these tasters tear great frightful holes and wounds in the paper however fine it is, with nails as long as fingers (buttonmakers’ nails are shorter, but not circumcisers’ among the Jews), before they give it a name to carry about with it, as the circumcisers do to the Jew boys. And after this, they circulate a slip of unsized paper, in which they find fault with me, and give me a bad name, all over the empire, in Saxony and Pomerania, and tell all Swabia in so many plain words that I’m an ass. May the devil confound their impertinence! This is the sort of birching, you see, that besom of yours will be getting me in for. Whereas, if I write beautifully and legibly, and with proper attention and ability—and every sheet of my Devilish Papers is so written—if I carefully weigh and consider every word and every page before I write it, if I am playful in one place, instructive in another, pleasing in all,—in that case I am bound to tell you, Lenette, that the tasters are people who are quite capable of appreciating work of that sort, and would think nothing of sitting down and circulating papers in which the least they would say of me would be that I had certainly brought something away from college in my head, and had a little to show for my studies. In short, they would say, they hadn’t expected it of me, and there was really something in me. Now a panegyric of this kind upon a husband is reflected, of course, upon his wife, and when the Augspurg people are all asking ‘Where does he live, this Siebenkæs whom everybody’s talking of?’ there are sure to be lots of folks in the Fuggery to answer, ‘Oh! he lives in Kuhschnappel, his wife was a daughter of Engelkraut, the senate clerk, and a very good wife she is to him.’”

“You’ve told me all that about bookmaking hundreds of times,” she answered. “And it’s just what the bookbinder says too; and I am sure he has all the best books through his hands, binding them.”

This allusion to his repetitions of himself, though not meant ill-temperedly, he didn’t very much relish. In fact, the habit had hitherto been, as it were, incubating unperceived in him, as a fever does in its early stage. Husbands, even those who are sage and of few words, talk to their wives with the same boundless liberty and unrestraint as they do to their own selves; and a man repeats himself to himself immeasurably oftener than to anybody else, and that without so much as observing that he does it, let alone taking any count of how often. The wife, however, both observes and counts; accustomed as she is to hear the cleverest (and most unintelligible) remarks from her husband’s lips daily, she can’t help remembering them when they occur again.

The hairdresser reappeared unexpectedly, bringing a fleeting cloud with him. He said he had been to all the poor devils in the house to see if he could get as much of the Martinmas rent out of them in advance as would pay his subscription to the shooting match, but that they were a set of church mice and he hadn’t succeeded. The whole garrison of them were naturally unequal to the payment of an impost of this description six whole weeks before it was due, inasmuch as the majority of them didn’t see how they were to pay it when it was due. So the Saxon came to the grandee of his house, to the “Lord of Ducats” as he styled the advocate. Siebenkæs couldn’t find in his heart to disappoint the patient soul with another “no” on the top of those he had borne so good-humouredly; his wife and he scraped together the little small change they had left out of the ducat, and sent him away rejoicing with half of the rent, three gulden. All they had left for themselves was—the question what they should do for light in the evening; for there weren’t even a couple of groschen in the house to get half a pound of candles, and there were no candles in natura.

I cannot say that he here turned deadly pale, or fainted, or began to rave. Praise be to every manly soul who has drunk the icy whey of stoicism for only half a spring, and does not fall down paralysed and frozen, like a woman, before the chill spectre of penury. In an age which has had all its strongest sinews cut through except the universal one, money, any diatribe, even the most extravagant, against riches, is nobler and more useful than the most accurately just depreciation of poverty. For pasquinades on gold dirt are agreeable to the rich, reminding them that though their riches may take to themselves wings, true happiness does not depend thereon; while the poor derive from them not bitterer feeling merely, but also the sweeter satisfaction of conquering the same. All that is base in man—thoughts, fancies, what we look on as being examples—all join in one chorus in praise of gold; why should we desire to deprive poverty of her true reserve force, her chevaliers d’honneur, philosophy and beggars’ pride?

The first thing Siebenkæs opened was not his mouth, but the door, and then the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, from which he carefully and with a good deal of gravity took down a bell-shaped tureen and three pewter plates, and put them on a chair. Lenette could no longer stand by in silence; she clasped her hands and said in a faint voice of shame, “Merciful Providence! is it come to selling our dishes?”

“I’m only going to turn them into silver,” he said; “as kings make church bells into dollars, so shall we make our bell-dishes into coin. There’s nothing you need be ashamed about in converting trash of table ware, the coffins of beasts, into currency, when Duke Christian of Brunswick turned a king’s silver coffin into dollars in 1662. Is a plate an apostle, do you think? Great monarchs have taken many an apostle, if he happened to be a silver one, Hugo of St. Caro and others as well, divided them (as it were) into chapters, verses, and legends, sent them to the mint, and then dispatched them off all over the world in that analysed form.”

“Ah! stupid nonsense,” she answered.

Some few readers will probably say “What else was it?” and I ought long ago to have apologized, perhaps, for the style of speech, so incomprehensible to Lenette, which the advocate makes use of.

He justified it satisfactorily to himself by the consideration that his wife always had some DISTANT idea of what he was talking about, even when he made use of the most learned technical expressions, and the farthest-fetched plays upon words, because of its being good practice, and of his liking to hear himself do it. “Women,” he would repeat, “have a distant and dim comprehension of all these things, and therefore don’t waste, in long tedious efforts to discover the precise signification of these unintelligibilities, precious time which might be better employed.” This, I may observe, is not much encouragement for Reinhold’s ‘Lexicon to Jean Paul’s Levana,’ nor for me personally either, in some senses.

“Ah! stuff and nonsense” had been Lenette’s answer. Firmian merely asked her to bring the pewter into the sitting-room, and he would talk the matter over sensibly. But he might as well have set forth his reasons before a woman’s skin stuffed with straw. What she chiefly blamed him for, was that by his contribution to the shooting-club purse he had emptied hers. And thus she herself suggested to him the best answer he could have made. He said, “It was an angel that put it in my head; because on St. Andrew’s Day I shall regain everything that I turn into silver now, and repewterise it immediately. To please you, I shall keep not only the tureen and the plates I get as prizes, but all the rest of the pewter ware, and put it all into your cupboard. I assure you I had made up my mind before to sell all my prizes.”

What was to be done, then? There was no help for it. This banished and expatriated table ware was lowered in the darkness of evening into old Sabel’s basket—and she was celebrated all over the town for transacting this sort of commission agency or transfer business, with as discreet a silence as if she were dealing in stolen gold. “Nobody gets it out of me,” she would say, “whose the things are. The treasurer, who’s dead and gone poor man—you know I sold everything he had in the world for him—he often used to say there was never the equal of me.”

But, my poor dear young couple, I fear this Sabbath[^[40]] or “Descent of the Saviour into Hades” is but little likely to help you long, in that antechamber of hell which you’ve got into. The flames are gone from about you to-day, certainly, and a cool sea-breeze is refreshing you, but tomorrow and the day after the old smoke and the old fire will be blazing at your hearts! However, I don’t want to put any restrictions upon your trade in tin. We’re quite right to have a good dinner to-day though we know perfectly well we shall be just every bit as hungry to-morrow again.

So the next morning Siebenkæs begged that he might be allowed to be all the quieter that day because he had been obliged to talk so much the day before. Our dear Lenette, who was a live washing-machine and scouring-mill, and in whose eyes the washing bill and the bill of fare had much of the weight of a confessor’s certificate, would sooner have let go her hold of everything in the world—her husband included—than of the duster and the besom. She thought this was merely his obstinate persistency, whereas it was really her own, in blowing the organ bellows and thundering away upon her pedal reed stops right behind her author’s back during the morning hours, whose mouths had two kinds of gold in them for him, namely gold from the golden age, and ordinary metallic gold. She might have played with a thirty-two feet stop out in the afternoon as long as she liked, but she wasn’t to be got out of her usual daily routine. A woman is the most heterogeneous compound of obstinate will and self-sacrifice that I have ever met with; she would let her head be cut off by the headsman of Paris for her husband’s sake, very likely, but not a single hair of it. And she can deny herself to almost any extent for others’ good, but not one bit for her own. She can forego sleep for three nights running for a sick person, but not one minute of a nap before bed-time, to ensure herself a better night’s sleep in bed. Neither the souls of the blest, nor butterflies, though neither of them possess stomachs, can eat less than a woman going to a ball or to her wedding, or than one cooking for her guests; but if it’s only her doctor and her own health that forbid her some Esau’s mess or other, she eats it that instant. Now men’s sacrifices are all just turned the opposite way.

Lenette, impelled by two imposing forces, what she was asked to do and what she wanted to do, tried to find the feminine line of the resultant, and hit upon the middle course of stopping her scouring and sweeping as long as he was sitting at his writing. But the moment he got up, and went to the piano for a couple of minutes, or to the window, or across the doorstep, that instant back she would bring her washing and scrubbing instruments of torture into the room again. Siebenkæs wasn’t long in becoming cognisant of this terrible alternation and relieving-of-the-guard between her besom and his (satirical) one; and the way she watched and lay in wait for his movements drove all the ideas in his head higgledy-piggledy. At first he bore it with really very great patience, as great as ever a husband has, patience, that is, which lasts for a short time. But after reflecting for a considerable period in silence, that the public, as well as he, were sufferers by this room-cleaning business, and that all posterity was, in a manner, watching and hanging upon every stroke of that besom, which might do its work just as well in the afternoon when he would only be at his law papers—the tumour of his anger suddenly broke, and he grew mad, i. e. madder than he was before, and ran up to her and cried—

“Oh! this is the very devil! At it again, eh! I see what you’re about. You watch till I get up from the table! Just be kind enough to finish me off at once; hunger and worry will kill me before Easter, whether or not. Good God! It’s a thing I really can not comprehend. She sees as well as possible that my book is our larder—that there are whole rations of bread in every page of it—yet she holds my hands the entire morning, so that I can’t do a line of it. Here I’ve been sitting on the nest all this time and only hatched as far as letter E, where I describe the ascent of Justice to heaven. Oh! Lenette! Lenette!”

“Very well,” said Lenette, “it’s all the same whatever I do, it’s sure to be wrong; do let me tidy the house properly, like any other woman.”

And she asked him, in a simple manner, why it was that the bookbinder’s little boy (the language is mine, not hers), who played fantasias the whole day long upon a child’s toy fiddle, composing and enjoying whole Alexander’s Feasts upon it, didn’t disturb him with his screeching unharmonical progressions—and how he bore the chimneysweep’s sweeping the other day so much better than he did her sweeping of the room. And as he couldn’t quite manage to condense, just in a moment, into few words the demonstration of the magnitude of the difference which existed between these things, he found it better to get into a rage again, and say—

“Do you suppose I’m going to make a great long speech and explanation gratis, and lose dollar after dollar at my work? Himmel! Kreuz! Wetter! The municipal code, the Roman pandects, forbid a coppersmith even to enter a street where a professor is working, and here’s my own wife harder than an old jurist—and not only that—she’s the coppersmith herself. I’ll tell you what it is, Lenette, I shall really speak to the Schulrath about this.” This did a great deal of service.

The produce of the Trinity dollar here arrived before the Schulrath; a piece of polite attention which no one would have expected from a man of so much learning and knowledge. No doubt all my readers will be as much delighted as if they were husbands of Lenette themselves at the fact that she was a perfect angel all the afternoon; her hands made no more noise at their work than her fingers or her needle; she even put off the doing of several things which were not necessary. She accompanied a sister in the oratorical art, who came in with a divine bonnet (in her hands, to be altered), all the way down stairs, not so much out of politeness as thoughtfulness, that all the points of principal importance connected with the doing up of the bonnet, which had already been settled, might be gone over again two or three times out of the advocate’s hearing.

This touched the old noise-hunter, and went to the weak and tender spot in him, his heart. He sought long in himself for a fitting thank-offering in return, till he at last hit upon quite a new sort of one.

“Listen, child,” he said, taking her hand very affectionately; “wouldn’t it be more reasonable in me if I were to amuse myself with my writing in the evening? I mean, if the husband were to do his creating at a time when the wife had no washing to do. Just think what a life of nectar and ambrosia that would be; we should sit opposite to each other with a candle between us—you at your sewing, I at my writing—the other people in the house would all have their work done and be at their beer—of course there wouldn’t be customers with bonnets coming at that time of night to make themselves visible and audible. The evenings will be getting longer too, and of course I shall have the more time for my writing fun, but we need say nothing about that now. What do you think, or what do you say (if you like the expression better), to this new style of life? Remember too, that we’re quite rich again now—the Russian Trinity dollar is like so much found money.”

“Oh! it will be delightful,” she said, “I shall be able to do all my household work in the morning, as a proper reasonable housekeeper should.”

“Yes, just so,” he answered, “I shall write away quietly at my satires all morning, then wait till evening, and go on where I left off.”

The evening of nectar and ambrosia came duly on, and was quite without a rival among all evenings that had gone before it. A young married couple, sitting one on each side of a table, working away quietly at their work, with a candle between them, have a considerable notion what happiness is. He was all happy thoughts and kisses; she all smiles, and what little noise she made with the frying-pan seemed no louder to him than what she made with her needle. “When people are earning double working-pay by the light of one candle,” he said, greatly delighted at the domestic reformation, “they needn’t, as far as I see, restrict themselves to a miserable dip, the thickness of a worm, which they can see nothing by, unless it be the wretchedness of its own light. To-morrow we’ll set up a mould candle, and no more about it.”

As I take some credit to myself for selecting for narration in this story such events only as are of universal interest, it will be sufficient cursorily to mention that the mould candle duly appeared next evening, and kindled a feeble strife, because, apropos of this candle, the advocate once more brought forward a new theory of his, concerning the lighting of candles. He held the somewhat schismatic opinion that the rational way of lighting all candles, more particularly thick ones, was to light them at the thick end, and not at the top or thin end; and that this was the reason of there being two wicks projecting from every candle. “A law of combustion,” he would add, “in support of which I need only refer (at least for women of sense) to the self-evident truth that, when a candle is burning down, it keeps growing larger and larger at its lower extremity—just as people who are burning down from debauchery grow thicker at theirs, with fat and dropsy. If we light the candle at the top, we find the result to be a useless lump, plug, or stump of tallow running all over our candlestick. Whereas, if we light it at the bottom, the liquefied grease from the thick end wraps itself gradually and with the most exquisite symmetry all over the thinner end as if feeding it, and equalising its proportions.”

In reply to which, Lenette, with some force, adduced Shaftesbury’s touchstone of truth, ridicule. “Why, everybody that came in of an evening, and noticed that I had put my candle upside down in the candlestick, would burst out laughing; and it would be the wife that everybody would blame.” So that a mutual treaty of peace had to put a period to this battle of the candle, to the effect that he should light his candle at the bottom, and she hers at the top. And for the present, as the candle common to both parties happened to be thick at the top, he agreed to admit, without objection, the erroneous method of lighting.

However, the Devil, who crosses and blesses himself at such treaties of peace, managed so to play his cards, that on this very day Siebenkæs chanced, in his reading, to come upon the touching anecdote of the younger Pliny’s wife holding the lamp for her husband that he might see to write. And it occurred to him that, now that he was getting along so swimmingly with his selection from the said Devil’s Papers, it would be a splendid arrangement, and save him many interruptions, if Lenette would snuff the candle always instead of his doing it himself.

“Of course,” said she, “I shall be delighted.” The first fifteen or twenty minutes passed, and everything seemed to be all right.

The above period having elapsed, he cocked up his chin towards the candle, by way of reminder to her to snuff it. Next, he gently touched the snuffers with the tip of his pen, with the like object, not saying anything however; and a little while after that, he moved the candlestick a little bit, and said softly, “The candle.” Matters now began to assume a more serious aspect; he began to observe and watch with greater attention the gradual obscuration of his paper, and consequently the very snuffers which, in Lenette’s hands, had promised to throw so much light on his labours, became the means of impeding his progress quite as effectually as the crabs did Hercules in his battle with the hydra. The two wretched ideas, “snuff” and “snuffers,” took bodily shape, and danced hand in hand, with a sprightly pertness up and down on every letter of his most biting satires. “Lenette,” he had soon to say again, “please to amputate that stupid black stump there, on both our accounts.”

“Dear me, have I been forgetting it?” she said, and snuffed it in a great hurry.

Readers of a historical turn—such as I should wish mine to be—can now see that things couldn’t but get worse and worse, and more and more out of joint. He had often to stop, making letters a yard or so in length, waiting till some beneficent hand should remove the black thorn from the rose of light, till, at length, he broke out with the word “Snuff!” Then he took to varying his verbs, saying, “Enlighten!” or “Behead!” or “Nip-off.” Or he endeavoured to introduce an agreeable variety by using other forms of speech, such as “The candle’s cap, Capmaker;” “There’s a long spot in the sun again;” or, “This is a charming chiaroscuro, well adapted for night thoughts in a beautiful Correggio-night; but snuff away all the same.”

At last, shortly before supper, when the charcoal stack in the flame had really attained a great height, he inhaled half a river of air into his lungs, and, slowly dropping it out again, said, in a grimly mild manner, “You don’t snuff a bit—as far as I can see, the black funereal pyre might rise up to the ceiling for all you would care. All right! I prefer to be the candle-snuffer of this theatre myself till supper-time; and while we’re at supper I shall just say to you, as a rational man, what there is to say on the subject.” “Oh! yes, please,” she said, quite delighted.

When she had set four eggs on the table, two for each, he commenced: “You see, I had been looking forward to my working at night being attended with several advantages, because I thought you would have managed this easy little task of snuffing the candle always at the right time, as a Roman lady of high rank made herself do duty as a candlestick for her celebrated husband, Pliny junior (to use a commercial expression), and held his light for him. I was mistaken, it appears; for, unfortunately, I can’t write with my toes under the table, like a person with no arms, nor yet in the dark, as a clairvoyant might. The only use the candle is to me, in the circumstances, is that it serves as an Epictetus lamp, enabling me to get some practice in stoicism. It had often as much as twelve inches of eclipse, like a sun, and I wished in vain, darling, for an invisible eclipse—such as frequently occurs in the heavens. The cursed slag of our candle hatches just these obscure ideas and gloomy night thoughts, which authors (too) often have. Whereas, gracious goodness! if you had only snuffed, as you ought to have done——”

“You’re in fun, are you not?” she asked. “My stitches are much smaller than your strokes, and I’m sure I saw quite well.”

“Well, dear,” he continued, “I’ll proceed to point out to you that, on the grounds of psychology and mental science, it isn’t that it matters a bit whether a person who is writing and thinking sees a little more or less distinctly or not, it’s the snuffers and the snuff that he can’t get out of his head, and they get behind his spiritual legs, trip up his ideas, and stop him, just as a log does a horse hobbled to it. For even when you’ve only just snuffed the candle, and I’m in the full enjoyment of the light, I begin to look out for the instant when you’ll do it next. Now, this watching being in itself neither visible nor audible, can be nothing but a thought, or idea; and as every thought has the property of occupying the mind to the exclusion of all others, it follows that all an author’s other and more valuable ideas are sent at once to the dogs. But this is by no means the worst of the affair. I, of course, ought not to have had to occupy my head with the idea of candle-snuffing any more than with that of snuff-taking; but when the ardently longed-for snuffing never comes off at all, the black smut on the ripe ear of light keeps growing longer—the darkness deepening—a regular funereal torch feebly casting its ray upon a half-dead writer, who can’t drive from his head the thought of the conjugal hand which could snap all the fetters asunder with one single snip;—then, my dearest Lenette, it’s not easy for the said writer to help writing like an ass, and stamping like a dromedary. At least, I express my own opinion and experience on the subject!”

On this, she assured him that, if he were really serious, she would take great care to do it properly next evening.

And, in truth, this story must give her credit for keeping her word, for she not only snuffed much oftener than the night before, but, the fact is, she hardly ever left off snuffing, particularly after he had nodded his head once or twice by way of thanks.

“Don’t snuff too often, darling,” he said, at length, but very, very kindly. “If you attempt too fine sub-sub-subdivisions (fractions of fractions of fractions of fractions) of the wick, it’ll be almost as bad as ever—a candle snuffed too short gives as little light as one with an overgrown wick which you may apply to the lights of the world and of the Church, that’s to say if you can. It’s only for a short while before and after the snuffing, entre chien et loup as it were, that that delicious middle-age of the soul prevails when it can see to perfection; when it is truly a life for the gods, a just proportion of black and white, both in the candle and on the book.”

I and others really do not see any great reason to congratulate ourselves upon this new turn of events. The poor’s advocate has evidently laid upon himself the additional burden, that all the time he is writing he has to keep watching and calculating,—superficially perhaps, but still, watching and calculating—the mean term, or middle-distance, between the long wick and the short. And what time has he left for his work?

Some minutes after, when the snuffing came a little too soon, he asked, though somewhat doubtfully, “Dirty clothes for the wash already?” Next time, as she let it be almost too long before she snuffed, he looked at her interrogatively, and said, “Well? well?”

“In one instant,” said she. By-and-by, he having got rather more deeply absorbed than usual in his writing, and she in her work, he found, when he suddenly came to himself and looked, one of the longest spears in the candle that had yet appeared, and with two or three thieves round it to the bargain.

“Oh, good Lord! ’Pon my soul, this is really the life of a dog!” cried he; and, seizing the snuffers in a fury, he snuffed the candle—out.

This holiday pause of darkness afforded a capital opportunity for jumping up, flying into a passion, and pointing out to Lenette more in detail how it was that she plagued and tormented him, however admirably he might have arranged things; and, like all women, had neither rhyme nor reason in her ways of doing things, always snuffing either too close or not close enough. She, however, lighted the candle without saying a word, and he got into a greater rage than before, and demanded to be informed whether he had ever as yet asked anything of her but the merest trifles possible to conceive, and if anybody but his own wedded wife would have hesitated for a moment to attend to them. “Just answer me,” he said.

She did not answer him; she set the freshly-lighted candle on the table, and tears were in her eyes. It was the first time he had caused her a tear, since her marriage. In a moment, like a person magnetised, he saw and diagnosed all that was diseased and unhealthy in his system; and, on the spot, he cast out the old Adam, and shied him contemptuously away into a corner. This was an easy task for him; his heart was always so open to love and justice, that the moment these goddesses came into view, the tone of anger with which he had commenced a sentence would fall into gentle melody before he reached the end of it; he could stop his battle-axe in the middle of its stroke.

So that a household peace was here concluded, the instruments thereof being one pair of moist eyes and one pair of bright kind ones; and a Westphalia treaty of peace accorded one candle to each party, with absolute freedom of snuffing.

But the peace was soon embittered, inasmuch as Penia, goddess of poverty (who has thousands of invisible churches all about the country, where most houses are her tabernacles and lazar cells), began to make manifest her bodily presence and her all-controlling power. There was no more money in the house. But, rather than place his honour and his freedom in pledge, and incur obligations which he had less and less prospect of repaying—I mean, rather than borrow—he would have sold all he had, and himself into the bargain, like the old German. It is said, the national debt of England, if counted out in dollars, would make a ring round the earth, like a second equator; however, I have not as yet measured this nose-ring of the British Lion, this annular eclipse, or halo, round the sun of Britain, myself. But I know that Siebenkæs would have considered a negative money-girdle of this sort about his waist to be a penance-belt stuck full of spines, or an iron ring, such as people who tow boats have on; a girdle compressing the heart in a fatal manner. Even supposing he were to borrow, and then stop payment, as nations and banking-houses do—a catastrophe which debtors and aristocratic persons, who have their wits about them, manage to avoid without difficulty, by the simple expedient of never beginning payment—yet, having only one friend whom he could convert into a creditor (Stiefel), he couldn’t possibly have seen this dear friend, who was in the first rank of his spiritual creditors already, figuring in the fifth rank, or that of the unpaid. He therefore avoided such a two-fold transgression as this would have been—a sin against both friendship and honour—by pledging things of less value, namely, household furniture.

He went back (but alone) to the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, and peeped through the rail to see whether there were two ranks of dishes or three. Alas! there wag but one rear-rank man of a plate standing behind his front-rank man, like double notes of interrogation. He marched the rear-rank man to the front accordingly, and gave him for travelling companions and fellow-refugees a herring-dish, a sauce-boat, and a salad-bowl. Having effected this reduction of his army, he extended the remaining troops so as to occupy a wider front, and subdivided the three large gaps into twenty small ones. He then moved these disbanded soldiers to the sitting-room, and went and called Lenette, who was in the bookbinder’s room.

“I’ve been looking at our pewter cupboard for the last five or ten minutes,” he said. “I really shouldn’t have noticed, if I hadn’t known it, that I had taken away the tureen and the plates. Should you?”

“Ah, indeed, I do notice it every day of my life,” she declared.

Here, however, being rather uneasy at the idea of what might be the result of too long an inspection, he hurried her into the sitting-room, where the dishes were which he had just taken out, and made known his intention of transposing, like a clever musician, this quartett from the key of pewter into that of silver. He proposed the selling of them, that she might be got to agree the more easily to their being pawned. But she pulled out every stop of the feminine organ, the clarion, the stopped diapason, flute, bird-stop, vox humana, and, lastly, the tremolo stop. He might say whatever he liked; she said whatever she liked. A man does not try to arrest the iron arm of necessity, or to avert it; he calmly awaits its stroke; a woman tries to struggle away from its grip, at any rate for a few hours, before it encircles her. It was in vain that Siebenkæs quietly and simply asked her if she knew what else was to be done. To questions of this sort, there float up and down in women’s heads not one complete answer, but thousands of half answers, which are supposed to amount to a whole one, just as in the differential calculus an infinite number of straight lines go to form a curved one. Some of these unripe, half-formed, fugitive, mutually auxiliary answers were——

“He shouldn’t have changed his name, and he would have had his mother’s money by this time.”

“Of course, he might borrow.”

“Look at all his clients, well off and comfortable, and he won’t ask them to pay him.”

“He never dreams of asking a fee for defending the infanticide.”

“And he shouldn’t spend so much money.” “He needn’t have paid that half-term’s rent in advance.” For the latter would have kept him going for a day or two, you see!

It is always a vain task to oppose the “minority of one” of the complete and true answer to the immense majority of feminine partial proofs of this sort; women know, at any rate, thus much of the law of Switzerland, that four half or invalid witnesses outweigh one whole or valid one.[^[41]] But the best way of confuting them is, to let them say what they have got to say, and not utter a word yourself; they’re certain to diverge, before very long, into subsidiary or accessory matters, which you yield to them, confuting them, as regards the real subject of argument, simply by action. This is the only species of confutation which they ever forgive. Siebenkæs, unfortunately, attempted to apply the surgical bandage of philosophy to Lenette’s two principal members, her head and her heart, and therefore commenced as follows—

“Dear wife, in the parish church you sing against worldly riches, like the rest of the congregation, and yet you have them fixed on your heart as firmly as your brooch. Now, I don’t go to a church, it’s true, but I have a pulpit in my own breast, and I prize one single happy moment more than the whole of this pewter dirt. Tell me truly now, has your immortal heart been pained by the tragical fate of the soup-tureen, or was it only your pericardium? The doctors prescribe tin, in powder, for worms; and may not this miserable tin, which we have broken into little pieces and swallowed, have had a similar effect on the abominable worms of the heart? Collect yourself, and think of our cobbler here, does his soup taste any the worse to him out of his painted iron saucière because his bit of roast meat is eaten out of it too? You sit behind that pincushion of yours, and can’t see that society is mad, and drinks coffee, tea, and chocolate out of different cups, and has particular kinds of plates for fruit, for salad, and for herrings, and particular sorts of dishes for hares, fish, and poultry. And I say that it will get madder and madder as time goes on, and order as many kinds of fruit plates from the china shops as there are different fruits in the gardens—at least, I should do it myself; and if I were a crown prince, or a grand master, I should insist upon having lark dishes and lark knives, snipe dishes and snipe knives; neither would I carve the haunch of a stag of sixteen upon any plate I had once had a stag of eight upon. The world is a fine madhouse, and one gets up and preaches his false doctrine in it when another has done, just as they do in a Quaker meeting. So the Bedlamites think that only two follies are veritable follies, follies which are past, and follies which are yet to come—old follies and new; but I would show them that theirs partake of the nature of both.”

Lenette’s only reply was an inexpressibly gentle request: “Oh! please, Firmian, do not sell the pewter.”

“Very well, then, I shan’t!” (he answered, with a bitter satirical joy at having got the brilliant neck of the pigeon fairly into the noose which he had so long had ready baited for it). “The emperor Antoninus sent his real silver plate to the mint, so that I might surely send mine; but just as you like: I don’t care twopence. Not an ounce of it shall be old; I shall merely pawn! I’m much obliged to you for the suggestion; and if I only hit the eagle’s tail on St. Andrew’s Day, or the imperial globe, I can redeem the whole of it in a minute—I mean with the money of the prize; at all events, the salad-bowl and the soup-tureen. I think you’re quite right. Old Sabel’s in the house, is she not? She can take the things and bring back the money.”

She let it be so now. The shooting-match on St. Andrew’s Day was her Fortunatus’s wishing-cap, the wooden wings of the eagle were as waxen flying-apparatus fixed on to her hopes, the powder and shot were the flower-seeds of her future blossoms of peace (as they are to crowned heads also). Thou poor soul, in many senses of the word! But the poor hope incredibly more than the rich; therefore it is that poor devils are more apt to catch the infection of lotteries than the rich—just as they are to catch the plague and other epidemics.

Siebenkæs—who looked down with contempt not only on the loss of his household goods, but on the loss of his money—was secretly resolved to leave the trash at the pawnbroker’s, unredeemed for ever, like a state-bond, even though he should chance to be king (at the shooting-match), and convert the transaction into a regular sale some future day, when he happened to be passing the shop.

After a few bright quiet days Peltzstiefel came again to make an evening call. Amid the manifold embargoes laid upon their supplies, the risks attending their smuggling operations, and as a tear or a sigh was laid as a tax which must necessarily be paid upon every loaf of bread, Firmian had had no time, to say nothing of inclination, to remember his jealousy. In Lenette’s case, matters were necessarily exactly reversed; and if she really has any love for Stiefel, it must grow faster on his money-dunghill than on the advocate’s field all over wells of hunger. The Schulrath’s eye was not one of those which read the troubles of a household in a minute, though they are masked by smiling faces; he noticed nothing of the kind. And for that very reason it came to pass that this friendly trio spent a happy hour free from clouds, during which, though the sun of happiness did not shine, yet the moon of happiness (hope and memory) rose shimmering in their sky. Moreover, Siebenkæs had the enjoyment of being provided with a cultivated listener, who could follow and appreciate the jingle of the bells on the jester’s cap, the trumpet fanfares of his Leibgeberish sallies. Lenette could neither follow nor appreciate them in the very least, and even Peltzstiefel didn’t understand him when he read him, but only when he heard him talk. The two men at first talked only of persons, not of things, as women do; only that they called their chronique scandaleuse by the name of History of Literature and Men of Letters. For literary men like to know every little trait and peculiarity of a great author—what clothes he wears, and what his favourite dishes are. For similar reasons, women minutely observe every little trait and peculiarity of any crown princess who happens to pass through the town, even to her ribbons and fringes. From literary men they passed to scholarship; and then all the clouds of this life melted away, and in the land of learning, the fair realm of science, the downcast sorrowful head, wrapped and veiled in the black Lenten altar-cloth of hardship and privation, is lifted up once more. The soul inhales the mountain air of its native land, and looks down from the lofty peak of Pindus upon its poor bruised and wounded body lying beneath—that body which it has to drag and bear about, sighing under its weight. When some dunned, needy scholar, some skin-and-bone reading-master, a poor curate with five children, or a baited and badgered tutor, is lying woeful and wretched—every nerve quivering under some instrument of torture—and a brother of his craft, plagued by just as many instruments of torture as himself, comes and argues and philosophises with him a whole evening, and tells him all the latest opinions of the literary papers, then truly the sand-glass which marks the hours of the torture[^[42]] is laid on its side—Orpheus comes, all bright and shining, with the lyre of knowledge in his hand, into the psychic hell of the two brethren in office, the sad tears vanish from their brightening eyes, the snakes of the furies twine into graceful curls, the Ixion’s wheel rolls harmoniously to the lyre, and these two poor Sisyphuses sit resting quietly on their stones and listen to the music. But the poor curate’s, the reading-master’s, the scholar’s, good wife, what is her comfort in her misery? She has none except her husband, who ought, therefore, to be very tender to all her shortcomings.

The reader was made aware in the first book that Leibgeber had sent three programmes from Bayreuth. Stiefel brought the one, by Dr. Frank, with him, and asked Siebenkæs to write a notice of it for the ‘Kuhschnappel Heavenly Messenger.’ He also took out of his pocket another little book, to receive its sentence. The reader will hail both these works with gladness, seeing that my hero and his has no money in the house, and will be able to live for a day or two by reviewing them. The second manuscript, which was in a roll, was entitled: ‘Lessingii, Emilia Galotti. Pro gymnasmatis loco latine reddita et publice acta, moderante J. H. Steffens. Cellis 1788.’

It seems that a good many of the subscribers to the ‘Heavenly Messenger’ have complained of the length of time which elapsed before this work was noticed, drawing disadvantageous comparisons between the ‘Messenger’ and the ‘Universal German Library;’ for the latter, notwithstanding the greatness of its universal German circulation, notices good works within a few years of their birth—sometimes even as early as the third year of their existence—so that the favourable notice can frequently be bound up with the work, the first paper-covers of it not being worn out before. The reason, however, why the ‘Heavenly Messenger’ did not, and in fact could not, review more of the books of the year 1788, was, that it was not until five years after that date that it—first saw the light itself.

“Don’t you think,” said Siebenkæs, in a friendly manner to Peltzstiefel, “that if I’m going to write proper notices of Messrs. Frank and Steffens here, my wife should take care not to make a thundering noise, swishing away with her broom at my back?”

“That might really be a matter of very considerable importance,” said Stiefel, gravely. Upon which a playful and somewhat abridged report of the proceedings in the household action of inhibition was laid before him. Wendeline fixed her kindly eyes on Peltzstiefel’s face, striving to read the Rubrum (the red title), and the Nigrum (the black body matter) of his judgment there before it was pronounced. Both colours were there. But though Stiefel’s bosom heaved with genuine sighs of the deepest affection for her, he nevertheless addressed her as follows—

“Madame Siebenkæs, this really won’t do at all; for God hath not created anything nobler than a scholar sitting at his writing. Hundreds of thousands of people, ten times told, are sitting in every quarter of the globe, as if on school-forms before him, and to all of these he has to speak. Errors held by the wisest and cleverest people he has to eradicate: ages, long since gone to dust and passed away, with those who lived in them, he has to describe with accuracy and minuteness; systems, the most profound and the most complex, he has to confute and overthrow, or otherwise to invent and establish, himself. His light has to pierce through massy crowns, through the Pope’s triple tiara, through Capuchin hoods and through wreaths of laurel—to pierce them all and enlighten the brains within. This is his work; and this work he can perform. But Madame Siebenkæs, what a strain on his faculties! What a grand sustained effort is necessary! It is a hard matter and a difficult to set up a book in type, but harder still to write it! Think what the strain must have been when Pindar wrote, and Homer, earlier still—I mean in the ‘Iliad’—and so with one after another, down to our own day. Is it any wonder, then, that great writers, in the terrible strain and absorption of all their ideas, have often scarcely known where they were, what they were doing, or what they would be at; that they were blind and dumb, and insensible to everything but what was perceived by the five interior spiritual senses, like blind people, who see beautifully in their dreams, but in their waking state are, as we have said, blind! This state of absorbedness and strain it is which I consider to explain how it was that Socrates and Archimedes could stand and be completely unconscious of the storm and turmoil going on around them; how Cardanus in the profundity of his meditation was unconscious of his Chiragra; others of the gout; one Frenchman of a great conflagration, and a second Frenchman of the death of his wife.”

“There, you see,” said Lenette, much delighted, in a low voice to her husband, “how can a learned gentleman possibly hear his wife when she’s at her washing and scrubbing?”

Stiefel, unmoved, went on with the thread of his argument: “Now, a fire of this description can only be kindled in absolute and uninterrupted calm. And this is the reason why all the great artists and men of letters in Paris live nowhere but in the Rue Ste. Victoire; the other streets are all too noisy. And it is hence that no smiths, tinkers, or tinmen, are allowed to work in the street where a professor lives.”

“No TINMEN especially,” added Siebenkæs, very gravely. “It should always be remembered that the mind cannot entertain more than half-a-dozen of ideas at a time; so that if the idea of noise should make its appearance as a wicked seventh, of course some one or other of the previous ideas, which might otherwise have been followed up or written down, takes its departure from the head altogether.”

Indeed Stiefel made Lenette give him her hand as a pledge that she would always stand still, like Joshua’s sun, while Firmian was smiting the foe with pen and scourge.

“Haven’t I often asked the bookbinder myself,” she said, “not to hammer so hard upon his books, because my husband would hear him when he was making his.” However, she gave the Schulrath her hand, and he went away contented with their contentment, leaving them quite hopeful of quieter times.

But, ye dear souls, of how little use to you is this state of peace, seeing ye are on half-pay and starving in this cold, empty, orphan hospital of an earth—how little will it help you in these dim labyrinthian wanderings of your destiny, of which even the Ariadne clue-threads all turn to nets and snares? How long will the poor’s advocate manage to live on the produce of the pawned pewter, and on the price of the two reviews which he is going to write? Only, we are all like the Adam of the epic, and take our first night to be the day of judgment, and the setting of the sun for the end of the world. We sorrow for our friends, just as if there were no brighter future YONDER, and we sorrow for ourselves as if there were no brighter future HERE. For all our passions are born Atheists and unbelievers.

CHAPTER VI.

MATRIMONIAL JARS—EXTRA LEAFLET ON THE LOQUACITY OF WOMEN—MORE PLEDGING—THE MORTAR AND THE SNUFF-MILL—A SCHOLAR’S KISS—ON THE CONSOLATIONS OF HUMANITY—CONTINUATION OF THE SIXTH CHAPTER.

This chapter commences at once with pecuniary difficulties. The wretched, leaky Danaid’s bucket which our good couple had to use for washing their groschen or two, their grains of gold-dust—few and far between as they were—out of the sands of their Pactolus, had always run dry again in the course of a couple of days, or of three at the outside. On this occasion, however, they had something certain to go upon, namely, the reviews of the two works; they could count upon four florins certainly, if not upon five.

Early next day, after his morning kiss, Firmian seated himself upon his critical judgment-bench again, and proceeded to pass his sentences. He might have written an epic poem, so light were the trade-winds which had hitherto been prevalent during the early hours of the day. From eight o’clock in the morning till eleven in the forenoon, he was engaged in holding up to the world in a favourable light the programme of Dr. Frank of Pavia, which was entitled: ‘Sermo Academicus de civis medici in republica conditione atque officiis, ex lege præipue erutis. Auct. Frank. 1785.’ He criticised, praised, blamed, and made extracts from this little production, till he thought he had covered enough paper to earn what would suffice to redeem the pawned herring-dish, salad-bowl, sauce-boat, and plates—his views on the work occupying one sheet, four pages, and fifteen lines.

The morning had passed so pleasantly, in holding Vehmgericht in this manner, that he thought he might as well go on, and hold another in the afternoon on the other book. He had never ventured upon this before; in the afternoons he had done advocate’s work, not reviewer’s, appearing in the character of defendant (maker of defence), not of fiscal (prosecutor). He had ample reason for this, seeing that every afternoon girls and maid-servants came with bonnets and caps, and with mouths full of conversational treasures, which they at once unpacked; richer in language than the Arabs, who have only a thousand words to express the same idea, these young women had a thousand idioms for it, or different ways of putting it;—and, as an organ when it’s out of order, immediately begins to cipher on twenty of its pipes or so at a time as soon as you begin to work the bellows, though no notes may be pressed down, so would they the moment the bellows of their lungs was set a-going. He didn’t mind this, however, seeing that at the particular hours to which these feminine alarum clocks were set, he let his own juristical alarum go rattling off too, and during the arguing of Lenette’s cases, went on with the arguing of his. He wasn’t disturbed by this; he maintained: “A lawyer is not to be put out, he can open and close his sentences when he chooses—his periods are long tapeworms, and can be lengthened or cut down with impunity—for each segment of them is itself a worm, each comma a period.”

But reviewing was another matter, and couldn’t be done so well. At the same time, I shall here faithfully transcribe for the benefit of the unlearned (the learned have read the review long ago), so much as he actually did manage to get done after his dinner. He wrote down the title of Steffen’s Latin translation of “Emilia Galotti,” and proceeded as follows—

“This translation meets a want which we have long experienced. It is, indeed, a striking phenomenon, that so few of the German classics have as yet been translated into Latin for the use of scholars, who, for their part, have supplied us with German versions of nearly all the Greek and Roman classic authors. The German nation can point to literary productions of its own which are quite worthy of perusal by scholars and by linguists, who, although they can translate them, do not understand them, because they are not written in Latin. Lichtenberg’s ‘Pocket Calendar’ has appeared simultaneously in a German edition—for the English, who are studying German—and in a French for our own haute noblesse. But why should not German original works, and even the very ‘Calendar’ itself, be made known to linguists and to scholars by means of a good and faithful Latin translation? There can be no doubt that they would be the very first to be struck by the great resemblance which may be traced between the odes of Ramler and those of Horace, if the former were but translated. The reviewer must confess that it has always been matter of surprise, as well as regret, to him that but two correct editions of Klopstock’s ‘Messiah’ have as yet appeared, the original edition and his own—and that there is no Latin edition of it for scholars—(Lessing having scarcely translated the ‘Invocation’ in his miscellaneous writings)—nor one in the curial style for lawyers, nor a plain prose one for the commercial world, nor one in Jew-German for the Jewish community.”

When he had got thus far, he was compelled to stop, because a housemaid wouldn’t stop, but went on reiterating what her mistress had gone on re-iterating, namely, how her night-cap was to be done up; twenty times did she sketch the ground-plan and elevation of the said cap, and laid weight on the necessity for speedy execution. Lenette answered her tautologies with equivalent ones, paying her back to the full in her own coin. Scarce was the housemaid out at the door, when the reviewer said—

“I haven’t written a word while that windmill was clacking. Lenette, tell me, is it really a positive impossibility for a woman to say, ‘It’s four o’clock,’ instead of ‘The four quarters to four have gone?’ Can no woman say, ‘The head-clout will be ready to-morrow,’ and then an end of the matter? Can no woman say, ‘I want a dollar for it,’ and there an end of the story? Nor, ‘Run in again to-morrow!’ and no more about it? Can you not do it, for instance?”

Lenette answered very coldly, “Oh! of course you think everybody thinks just as you think yourself!”

Lenette had two feminine bad habits, which have sent millions of male rockets, or pyrotechnic serpents—namely, curses—up skywards. The first was, that whenever she gave the servant an order, she did it as if it were a memorial in two copies, and then went out of the room with her and repeated the order in question three or four times more in the passage. The second was, that let Siebenkæs shout a thing to her, as distinctly as man could, her first answer was, “What?” or, “What do you say?” Now, I not only advise ladies always to demand a “second of exchange” of this sort when they are in any embarrassment for an answer, and I laud them for so doing; but in cases where what is required of them is attention, not the truth, this ancora and bis which they cry to a speaker who is anxious not to waste time, is as cumbersome as it is unnecessary. Matters of this kind are trifles in married life only so long as the sufferer by them does not complain of them. But when they have been found fault with they are worse than deadly sins, and felonies, and adulteries—seeing that they occur much more frequently.

If the author were disturbed at his work by pleonasms of the above description; what he would do would be, not deliver a serious lecture, but (because this is a good opportunity) write the following

EXTRA LEAFLET ON FEMALE LOQUACITY.

“The author of the work on ‘Marriage’ has said, ‘A woman who does not talk is a stupid woman.’ But it is easier to be his encomiast than his disciple. The cleverest women are often silent with women, and the most stupid and most silent are often both with men. On the whole, this statement, which has been applied to the male sex, is true also of the female, namely, that those who think most have least to say; as frogs cease croaking when a light is brought to the side of their pond. Moreover, the extreme talkativeness of women is a result of the sedentary nature of their occupations. Men, whose work is sedentary, such as tailors, shoemakers, weavers, have in common with women not only their hypochondriac fancies, but also their loquacity.

“The little work-tables, where feminine fingers are employed, are also the playgrounds of the feminine imagination, and their needles become little magic wands, wherewith they transform their rooms into isles of spirits filled with dreams. Hence it is that a letter or a book distracts a woman who is in love more than the knitting of a whole pair of stockings. Savages say that the monkeys refrain from talking that they may not be made to work; but many a woman talks twice as much when she is working as when she is not.

“I have devoted much thought to the question, what purpose this peculiarity subserves in the economy of the universe. At first it might strike us that Nature has ordained these re-iterations of that which has been already said with a view to the development of metaphysical truths: for, as demonstration, according to Jacobi and Kant, is merely a series, or progression, of identical propositions, it is evident that women, who always proceed from the same thing to the same thing, are continually demonstrating. There can be no doubt, however, that the object which Nature has chiefly had in view is the following. Accurate observers of nature have pointed out that the reason why the leaves of trees keep up their constant fluttering motion is that the atmosphere may be purified by this perpetual flagellation—this oscillation of the leaves having very much the effect of a light and gentle breeze.[^[43]] It would, however, be very wonderful had Nature—always economising her forces, Nature, who never does anything in vain—ordained this much longer oscillation, this seventy years’ wagging of the feminine tongue, to no definite purpose. For the purpose in question, however, we have not far to seek. It is the same which is subserved by the quivering of the leaves of trees. The endless, regular, unceasing beat of the feminine tongue is to assist in agitating and stirring up the atmosphere, which would otherwise become putrescent. The moon has her ocean of water, and the feminine head has its ocean of air, to stir into salubrity and to keep in perpetual freshness. Hence a universal Pythagorean noviciate would, sooner or later, give rise to epidemics, and Chartreuses of nuns would become pesthouses. Hence it is that diseases of the pestiferous type are less frequent among civilised nations, who talk the most. And hence Nature’s beneficent arrangement that it is exactly in the largest cities—and moreover in the winter—and moreover indoors—and in large assemblages—that women talk most, inasmuch as it is exactly in these places and at these periods that the atmosphere is most impure, and charged with the largest proportion of carbonic acid and other products of respiration, &c., requiring to be thoroughly fanned and set in motion. And, indeed, Nature here overthrows all artificial barriers and impediments; for, although many European women have endeavoured to imitate those of America—who fill their mouths with water in order to keep silence—and, while making calls, fill theirs with tea or coffee, yet these fluids have been found rather to facilitate than to prevent the free flow of feminine speech.

“I trust that in this I am far from being like the narrow-minded teleologists, who, to every grand sun-path, or sun-orbit of Nature, must always be appending and intercalating little subsidiary foot-tracks and ends in view. Such persons might permit themselves the supposition (I should be ashamed to do so) that the oscillation of the female tongue, the use of which is sufficiently apparent in the motion which it communicates to the atmosphere, may possibly serve to give typical illustration to some thought or idea of a spiritual nature—e. g. the female soul itself, perhaps.

“This belongs to that class of things with respect to which Kant has said that they can neither be proved nor disproved. I myself should rather incline, however, to the opinion that the talking of women is an indication of the cessation of thought and mental activity—as in a good mill the warning bell only rings when there is no corn left in the hopper. Moreover, every husband knows that tongues are attached to women’s heads in order to give due notice, by their clanging, that some contradiction, something irregular or impossible, is dominating in them.[^[44]] Similarly, H. Müller’s calculating machine has a little bell in it, which rings merely to give notice that some error has occurred in a calculation. However, it now remains for the natural philosopher to prosecute this inquiry, and to determine to what extent my views may prove to be erroneous.”

I may just mention that the above leaflet was written by the advocate.

He did not finish his review till the following morning. He had intended to go on writing down his ideas on the subject of the translation of Emilia Galotti till the money coming to him as the price of the ideas should be enough to pay for new toes to his boots—Fecht asked a sheet and a half for doing the pair—but he had not time for this, as he was obliged to calculate the price of his notice by the compositor’s sight-rule, and get the money for it that very day.

The reviews were sent to the editor; the critical invoice amounted to three florins four groschen and five pfennige. Strange! we smile when we see the spiritual and the corporeal, intellect and hard cash, pain and pecuniary compensation, stated as sums in proportion; but is not our whole life an equation, a sum in “partnership” between soul and body; and is not all action upon us corporeal, and all reaction from us spiritual?

The servant-girl brought back only “kind regards;” not the leaves of silver which his ink should have crystallised into. Peltzstiefel had not given the matter a thought. He was so absorbed in his studies that he was indifferent to his own money, and blind to the poverty of other people. He was capable, indeed, of noticing a hiatus; but it must be in a manuscript—not in his own or other people’s shoes, stockings, &c. An inward fire blinded this fortunate man to the phosphorescence of the rotten wood around him. And happy is every actor in the school-theatricals of life who finds the lofty inward delusion suffice to compensate him for the delusions without, or to hide them from his view;—who is so carried away by the enthusiasm with which he enters into and renders his spiritual rôle, that the coarse daubs of landscapes of the scenery seem to bloom, and the branches to rustle in the refreshing showers (of peas) from the rain-box—and who does not wake to reality at the shifting of the scenes.

But this beautiful blindness of the Rath was very distressing to our two dear friends; their little constellation, which was to have shone in their evening sky, fell all down in meteoric drops upon the earth. I do not blame Stiefel; he had an ear for distress, though not an eye. But ye rich and great ones of the earth, who, helpless in the honeycombs of your pleasures, swimming with clogged wings in your melted sugar of roses, do not find it an easy matter to move your hand, put it into your money-bag, and take out the wage of him who helped to fill your honey-cells—an hour of judgment will strike at last for you, and ask you if ye were worthy to live, let alone to live a life of pleasure, when ye avoid even the trifling trouble of paying the poor who have undergone the immense trouble of earning. But ye would be better if ye thought what misery your comfortable, indolent, indisposition to open a purse, or to read a little account, often inflicts upon the poor; if ye pictured to yourselves the backward start of hopeless disappointment of some poor woman whose husband comes home without his money—the starvation, the obliteration of so many hopes, and the weary sorrowful days of a whole family.

The advocate, therefore, put on his wicked silverising face again and went prying about into every corner with his eyeglass, making himself into a species of pressgang of the furniture. As a king or an English minister sits up in his bed at night, rests his head on his hand, and considers what commodity or what tree-stem full of birch-sap he may stick his winetap of a new tax into, or (in another metaphor) so cut the peat of taxation that new peat may grow in its place: thus did Siebenkæs. With his letter of marque in his hand he scanned minutely every flag that hove in sight; he lifted up his shaving-dish and set it down; he shook the paralytic arms of an old chair till they cracked again—he subjected it to a trial more severe, by sitting down in it and getting up again.—I interrupt my period to observe en passant that Lenette fully understood the danger of this conscription and measuring of the children of the land, and that she protested continuously and unavailingly against this game of pledges with Job-like lamentations.—He also took down from its hook an old yellow mirror, with a gilt leaf-pattern frame, which hung in the bedroom opposite the green-railed bed, examined its wooden case and the back of it, moved the glass of it up and down a little and then hung it up again—an old firedog and some bedroom crockery he did not touch; he whipt the lid off a porcelain butter-boat, made, according to the plastic art of the period, in the shape of a cow, and glanced into the inside of it, but set it back, empty and full of dust, as an ornament on the mantelpiece again; he weighed, longer and with both hands, a spice-mortar, and put it back again into the cupboard.

He looked more and more dangerous, and more and more merry; he drew out with both arms the drawer of a wardrobe, shoved back table-napkins, and begun to overhaul a mourning-dress of checked cotton a little ——. But here Lenette flew out, seized him by his overhauling arm, and cried, “Why not, indeed! But, please God, it shall not come to that with me!”

He shut the drawer quietly, opened the cupboard again, and carefully lifted the mortar on to the table, saying, “Oh! very well, it matters little to me, it comes all to the same thing; the mortar will have to take its departure.” By covering this bell of shame with his open hand by way of a damper, he was able to take out the pestle, its clapper, without producing any ring or clang. He had been perfectly aware all the time that she would rather pawn the garment of her soul (i. e. her body) than the checked garment of that garment; but it was of set purpose that, like the Court of Rome, he demanded the entire hand that he might be the more likely to obtain a single finger of it—in this case the mortar—and moreover he hoped the mere frequency with which he reiterated his determination would save him the necessity of stating any reasons, and that he would familiarise Lenette with the bugbear and hobgoblin by keeping it continually before her eyes (I mean, with his design upon the mortar). Wherefore he went on to say, “The fact is, that it’s very little that we have to pound in the course of a twelvemonth, except when we have a quarter of a fat beast; at the same time, just give me some idea why you’re so anxious to keep the checked gown—what on earth is the use of it? The only time you can wear it will be when I depart this life. Now, Lenette, that’s a terrible sort of idea; I can’t stand it. Coin the dress into silver—eliminate it altogether; I’ll send two pairs of mourning-buckles of mine along with it; I hope I may never have anything to buckle with them again.”

She stormed without bounds and preached with much wisdom against all “careless, thoughtless householders;” and this for the very reason, that she felt it was only too probable that he would soon take every article of furniture in the place (which he had been feeling and valuing, like a person buying bullocks) to the slaughter-house, and—goodness gracious! the checked dress among the rest. “I had rather starve,” she cried, “than throw away that mortar for a mere song. The Schulrath is sure to be here to-morrow evening, with the money for your reviews.”

“Now you begin to talk sense,” said he; and he carried the pestle horizontally in both his hands into the bedroom, and laid it on to Lenette’s pillow—next bringing the mortar, and placing it on his own. “If people should happen to hear it ring,” he said, “they would think I wanted to turn it into silver, as we were pounding nothing in it; and I shouldn’t like that.”

The united capital contained in his greenish-yellow cotton-purse, and her large money-bag (which she wore at her girdle), amounted to about three groschen, good money. In the evening there would have to be a groschen-loaf bought, for cash, and the remainder of the metallic-seed must be sown in the morning to grow the breakfast- and dinner-crop. The servant-girl went out for the bread, but came back with the groschen and with the Job’s message, “There’s nothing left at the bakers’ shops at this time of night but two-groschen loaves; father (the cobbler Fecht) couldn’t get any either.” This was lucky; the advocate could enter into partnership with the shoemaker, and it would be easy for these partners, by each contributing a groschen to the partnership funds, to obtain a two-groschen loaf. The Fechts were asked if they agreed to this. The cobbler, who made no secret of his daily bankruptcies, answered—

“With all my heart. G—d d—n me! (Heaven forgive me for swearing) if I and the whole crew of young tatterdemalions in the place have had a scrap of anything to fill our mouths with the whole blessed day but waxed-ends.” In short, this coalition of the tiers état with the learned estates put an end to the famine, and the covenanting parties broke the loaf in two and weighed it in a just balance, it being itself both the weight and the thing weighed. Ah! ye rich! Ye, with your manna, or bread sent from heaven, little think how indispensable to poverty are small weights, apothecaries’ measure, heller-loaves,[^[45]] a dinner for eight kreuzers (and your shirt washed into the bargain); and a broken-bread shop, where mere crumbs and black-bread powder are to be had for money; and how the comfort of a whole family’s evening depends on the fact that your hundredweights are on sale in lots of half-an-ounce.

They ate, and were content. Lenette was in good humour because she had gained her point. At night the advocate put the things which were to be pawned upon a soft chair. In the morning she facilitated his writing by keeping very quiet. It was a good omen, however, that she did not put the mortar back into the cupboard. And Siebenkæs fired off various queries out of the said bomb-mortar in parabolic curves. He knew perfectly well that the Loretto- and Harmonica-bell in question must march that day or the next over the frontier for a small pecuniary Abzug-geld.[^[46]] Women always like to put everything off till the very last possible moment.

Peltzstiefel came in that evening. It was both ridiculous and natural to expect that the first thing the editor of the ‘Heavenly Messenger’ would do would be to pay the critic his wages, so that he might at least be able to set before his editor a candlestick with a candle in it, and a beer-glass containing beer. Nothing can be more cruel than an anxiety of this sort, because this kind of shame breaks in a moment all the springs in the human machine. Siebenkæs wouldn’t let it trouble his head, because he knew Stiefel wouldn’t let it trouble his. But Lenette was to be pitied, inasmuch as the blushes of her shame were heightened by her fondness for Stiefel! At last the Rath put his hand in his pocket. They thought now he was going to produce the review-money; but all he took out was his snuff-machine, his tobacco-grater, and he dived back into his coat-tail pocket for half-an-ounce of rappee to put upon this little chopping-bench. But he had grated the half-ounce already. He searched his breeches-pockets for money to send for another half-ounce. Truly—and here he swore an oath for which he would have incurred a fine had he been in England—he had sent, like an ass, not only his purse but also the money for the reviews, carefully counted out and neatly wrapped in paper, with his breeches—they were his plush ones—to the tailor’s. He said it wasn’t the first time, and it was a lucky job that the tailor was an honest man; the only thing was, he hadn’t noticed how much there was in his purse. He innocently requested Lenette to “send and get him an ounce of rappee; he would repay her next morning, when he sent the money for the reviews.” Siebenkæs roguishly added, “And send for some beer at the same time, dear.” He and Stiefel looked out of window; but he saw that his poor wife—her bosom torn with sighs, and suffering peine forte et dure—stole into the bedroom and noiselessly put the spice-mill into her apron.

After a good half-hour, rappee, beer, money, and happiness entered the room; the bell-metal of the mortar was transformed into sustenance for the inward man, and the bell in question had been somewhat like the little altar-bell, which in this case, besides announcing a transubstantiation, or transformation of the substance of the bread, as it does in the Roman Catholic Church, had undergone one itself. Their blood no longer gurgled among rocks and stones, but flowed softly and tranquilly along, by meadows, and over silver sands. Such is man. When he is in the depths of misery, the first happy moment lifts him out; when he is at the height of bliss, the remotest sorrowful moment, even though it is down beneath the horizon, casts him to earth. No great man, who has maîtres de cuisine, clerks of the cellar, capon-stuffers, and confectioners, has any true enjoyment of the pleasure it is to give and receive hospitality; he gets and gives no thanks. But a poor man and his poor guest, with whom he halves his loaf and his can, are united by a mutual bond of gratitude.

The evening wound a soft bandage about the pain of the morning. The poppy-juice of sixty drops of happiness was taken hourly, and the medicine had a gently soothing and exhilarating power. When his old, kind friend was leaving, Siebenkæs gave him a hearty, grateful kiss for his cheering visit, Lenette standing by, with the candle in her hand. Her husband, as some little compensation to her for having pounded her little fit of obstinacy to groats in the mortar, said to her in an off-hand, cheerful manner, “You give him one, too.” The blushes mantled on her cheeks like fire, and she leant back, as if she had a mouth to avoid already. It was quite clear that, if she had not been obliged to perform the office of torch-bearer, she would have fled to her room on the spot. The Rath stood before her beaming with affectionate friendliness—something like a white winter-landscape in sunshine—waiting till—she should give him the kiss. The fruitlessness of this expectation, and the prematureness of her bending her head out of the way, began to vex him a little at last. Somewhat hurt, but still beaming as affectionately as ever, he said—

“Am I not worth a kiss, Madam Siebenkæs?”

Her husband said, “Surely you don’t expect my wife to give you the kiss. She would set her hair and everything in a blaze with the candle!”

Upon this, Peltzstiefel inclined his head slowly and cautiously, and at the same time commandingly, down to her mouth, and laid his warm lips on hers, like the half of a stick of melted sealing-wax on the other half. Lenette gave him more space, by bending back her head; yet it must be said that while she held her left arm with the candle high up in the air, for fear of fire, she did a good deal to push away the Rath—another, more proximate, fire—politely with the other. When he was gone, she was still just the least bit embarrassed. She moved about with a certain floating motion, as though some great happiness was buoying her up with its wings—the evening red was still bright on her cheek, though the moon was high in the heavens: her eyes were bright, but dreamy, seeming to notice nothing about her—her smiles came before her words, and she spake very few—not the slightest allusion was made to the mortar. She touched everything more gently, and looked out of the window at the sky two or three times. She didn’t seem to care to eat more of the two-groschen loaf, and drank no beer, but only a glass or two of water. Anybody else—myself for example—would have held up his finger and sworn he was looking upon a girl who had just had a first kiss from her sweetheart.

And I shouldn’t have regretted having taken that oath had I seen the sudden blush which suffused her face next day when the money for the reviews and the snuff was brought. It was a miracle, and an extraordinary piece of politeness, that Peltzstiefel should not have forgotten about his having contracted this little loan—little debts of two or three groschen always escaped his preoccupied memory. But rich people, who always carry less money about them than the poor, and therefore borrow from them, ought to inscribe trifling debts of this sort on a memorial tablet, in their brain, because it is very wrong to break into a poor devil’s purse, who gets, moreover, no thanks for these groschen of his which thus drop into the stream of Lethe.

Now, I beg to say, I should be happy to give two sheets of this manuscript if the day of the shooting-match were but come, solely because our dear couple build so upon it and upon its bird-pole. For the position of these people is really going on from bad to worse; the days of their destiny move with those of the calendar, from October on to November, that is to say, from the end of summer to the beginning of winter, and they find that moral frosts and nights get harder and longer in the same ratio with those of the season. However, I must go regularly on with my story.

I think there is no doubt that November, the month which is such a Novembriseur of the British, is the most horrible month of all the year—for me it is a regular Septembriseur. I wish I could hybernate, sleep, till the beginning of the Christmas month, December. The November of ’85 had, at the commencement of its reign, a dreadful wheezing breath, a hand as cold as death, and an unpleasant lachrymal fistula; in fact it was unendurable. The northeast wind, which in summer it is so pleasant to hear blowing past one’s ears, because one knows it is a sure sign of settled weather, is, in autumn, only a sign of steady cold. To our couple the weathercock was really a funeral standard. Though they didn’t exactly go out to the woods themselves with baskets and barrows to pick up fallen branches and twigs, like the poor day-labourer, they had to buy the stuff for firewood from the wood-gatherers, by weight, as if it had been wood from the Indies, and it had to be dried by the combustion of other wood before it would burn. But this damp cold weather was more trying to the advocate’s stoicism, after all, than even to his purse; he couldn’t run out and go up a hill, and look about him, and seek in the heavens for that which consoles and comforts the anxious and sorrowful, that which dissipates the clouds which shroud our life, and shows us guiding nebulæ (Magellan’s clouds), if nothing else, gleaming through the fog-banks. For when he could go up the Rabenstein, or some other hill, he could get sight from thence of the aurora of the sun of happiness, though that sun was under his horizon; the sorrows and torments of this earthly life lay, writhing, like other vipers, in the clefts and hollows beneath him, and no rattlesnake could rear itself with its fangs up to his hill. Ah! there, in the free air, close to the ocean of life which stretches on into the invisible distance of infinity, near to the lofty heavens, the blue coal smoke of the stifling, suffocating dwelling of our daily life cannot rise to us, we see its wreaths hanging far down beneath; our sorrows drop, like leeches, from our bleeding bosoms, and raised, for the time, above our woes, we stretch our arms—no fetters on them now, though sore and marked, and bruised with the galling iron—we stretch them out as if to soar in the pure bright æther; we stretch them out, and fain would take to our bosom the peaceful universe above us, we stretch them to the invisible eternal Father, like children hastening home to Him—and we open them wider yet to clasp our visible mother, created Nature, crying, “Oh take not this solace, this comfort, away from me, when I am down there again among the fog and the sorrow.” And why is it that prisoners and the sick are so wretched in their confinement? They are there shut up in their holes, the clouds sail over them, they can only see the mountains far away in the distance, these mountains whence, as from those of the Polar regions in summer midnights, the sun, down below the horizon, can be seen shining with a mild face, as if in slumber. But in this wretched weather though Siebenkæs could not enjoy the consolations of imagination, which bloom beneath the open sky, he could derive comfort from reason, which thrives in the flower-pots of the window-sills. His chief consolation, which I commend to everybody, was this: Man is under the pressure of a necessity of two kinds—an every-day necessity, which, everybody bears uncomplainingly, and a rare, or yearly-recurrent necessity, which is only submitted to after struggles and complaints. The daily and everlastingly recurrent necessity is this—that corn does not ripen in winter—that we have not got wings, though so many lower creatures have them—or that we cannot go and stand upon the ring-shaped craters of the lunar mountains, and looking down into the abysses, which are miles in depth, watch the marvellous and beautiful effects of the setting sun’s rays. The annual, or rarely recurrent, necessity is that there is rainy weather when the corn is in blossom—that there are a great many water-meadows of this world where it is very bad walking, and that sometimes, because we have corns, or no shoes, we cannot even walk anywhere. Only the annual necessity and the daily are of exactly equal magnitude, and it is just as senseless to murmur because we have paralysed limbs as because we have no wings. All the PAST—and this alone is the subject of our sorrow—is of so iron a necessity that in the eyes of a superior intelligence it is just as senseless of an apothecary to mourn because his shop is burnt to the ground as to sigh because he can’t go botanising in the moon, although there may be many things in the phials there which he has not got in his.

I mean to introduce an extra leaflet here on the consolations which we may meet with in this damp, chilly, draughty life of ours. Anybody who may be annoyed at these brief digressions of mine, and is scarcely to be consoled, let him seek consolation in this—

EXTRA LEAFLET ON CONSOLATION.

A time may, that is to say, must come when it shall be held to be a moral obligation not only to cease to torment other people, but to cease to torment ourselves; a time must and will come when we shall wipe away the greater part of our tears, even here on earth, were it only from proper pride.

It is true, nature is so constantly drawing tears from our eyes, and forcing sighs from our breasts, that a wise man can scarcely ever wholly lay aside his body’s garb of mourning; but let his soul wear none! For if it is a simple duty or merit to endure minor sorrows with proper cheerfulness, it is likewise a merit, only a greater one, to bear the greatest sorrows bravely, just as the same reason which enjoins the forgiveness of small injuries is equally valid for the forgiveness of the greatest.

What we have principally to contend against, and to treat with due contempt, in sorrow, as in anger, is its paralysing poisonous sweetness, which we are so loth to exchange for the exertion of consoling ourselves and of exercising our reasoning faculties.

We must not expect Philosophy to produce, with one stroke of the pen, the converse effect to that which Rubens produced, when he converted a smiling child into a weeping one with one stroke of his brush. It is sufficient if she converts the soul’s deep mourning garb into half-mourning; it is enough when I can say to myself, “I am content to bear that share of my sorrow of which my philosophy has not relieved me; but for her it would have been greater—the gnat’s sting would have been a wasp’s.”

It is only through the imagination, as from an electric condenser, that even physical pain emits its sparks upon us. We would bear the severest physical pains without a wince if they were not of longer duration than a sixtieth part of a second; but we never really do have an hour of pain to endure, but only a succession of sixtieth parts of a second of pain, the sixty separate rays of which are concentrated into the focus and burning-point of a second, and directed upon our nerves by the imagination alone. The most painful part of corporeal pain is the incorporeal part of it, that is to say, our own impatience, and our delusive conviction that it will last for ever.

We all know for certain that we shall have given up grieving for many a loss, in twenty, ten, or two years why do we not say to ourselves, “Very well—if this is an opinion which I shall cease to hold in twenty years’ time,—I prefer to abandon it to-day, at once? Why must it take me twenty years to abandon an error, when I need not hold it twenty hours?”

When I awake from a dream which has painted for me an Otaheite on the black background of the night, and find the flowery land melted away, I scarcely sigh, and I think it was but a dream. How were it if I had actually possessed this flowery island in waking life, and it had been submerged in the sea by an earthquake? Why should I not, then also, say, “The island was but a dream”? Why am I more inconsolable for the loss of a LONGER dream than for the loss of a SHORTER (for that is what constitutes the distinction),—and why does man think a great loss less necessary and less probable than a small?

The reason is that every sentiment and every passion is a mad thing, demanding, or building, a complete world of its own. We are capable of being vexed because it’s past twelve o’clock, or because it’s not past, but only just twelve o’clock. What nonsense! The passion wants besides a personality of its own (sein eignes Ich), and a world of its own,—a time of its own as well. I beg every one, just for once, to let his passions speak plainly out, and to listen to them, and ascertain what it is that they really each of them want; he will be dismayed when he sees what monstrous things are these desires of theirs which they have previously only half muttered. Anger would have but one neck for all mankind, love would have but one heart, sorrow but one pair of lachrymal ducts, and pride two bent knees!

When I was reading in Widman’s ‘Höfer Chronik’ the account of the fearful, bloody times of the thirty years’ war, and, as it were, lived them over again; when I heard once more the cries for help of those poor suffering people, all struggling in the Danube-whirlpools of their days—and saw the beating of their hands, and their delirious wanderings on the crumbling pillars of broken bridges, foaming billows and drifting ice-floes dashing against them; and then, when I thought “All these waves have gone down, the ice is melted, the howling turmoil is all sunk to silence, so are the human beings and all their sighs”—I was filled with a melancholy comfort, a thought of consolation for all times, and I asked, “Was, and is, then, this passing, cursory, transient burst of sorrow at the CHURCHYARD-GATE OF LIFE, which three steps into the nearest cavern could end, a fit cause for this cowardly lamentation?” Truly if, as I believe, there be such a thing as true patience under an eternal woe, then, verily, patience under a transitory sorrow is hardly worth the name.

A great but unmerited national calamity should not humble us, as the theologians would have it—it should make us proud. When the long, heavy sword of war falls upon mankind, and thousands of blanched hearts are torn and bleeding—or when in the blue, pure evening sky the hot cloud of a burning city, smoking on its funereal pyre, hangs dark and lurid, like a cloud of ashes, the ashes of thousands of hearts and joys all burnt to cinders and dust—then let thy spirit be lifted up in pride, let it loathe, contemn, and despise tears, and that for which they fall, and let it say—

“Thou art much too small a thing, thou every-day, common life, that an immortal being should be inconsolable with regard to thee, thou torn and tattered chance-bargain of an existence. Here upon this earth—the ashes of centuries rolled into a sphere, worked into shape and form from vapour by convulsion—the cry of one dreaming in a sorrowful dream—I say, it is a disgrace that the sigh should cease only when the breast which gives it utterance is resolved into its elements, and that the tear should cease to flow only when the eye is closed in death.”

But moderate this thy sublime transport of indignation and put to thyself this question, “If He, the Infinite one, who, veiled from thy sight, sits surrounded by the gleaming abysses, without bounds save such as Himself creates, were to lay bare to thy sight the immeasurability of infinity, and let Himself be seen of thee as he distributes the suns, the great spirits, the little human hearts, and our days, and a tear or two therein; wouldst thou rise up out of thy dust against Him, and say, ‘Almighty, be other than thou art!’”

But there is one sorrow which will be forgiven thee, and for which there is recompense; it is sorrow for thy dead. For this sweet sorrow for thy lost ones is, in truth, but another form of consolation; when we long for them, this is but a sadder way of loving them still; and when we think of their departure we shed tears, as well as when we picture to ourselves our happy meeting with them again. And perhaps these tears differ not.

CONTINUATION AND CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER VI.

THE CHECKED CALICO DRESS—MORE PLEDGES—CHRISTIAN NEGLECT OF THE STUDY OF JUDAISM—A HELPING ARM (OF LEATHER) STRETCHED FORTH FROM THE CLOUDS—THE AUCTION.

The St. Andrew’s shooting-match will take place in the seventh chapter: the present one fills up the wintry thorny interval up to that period—that is to say, the wolf-month with its wolf-hunger. Siebenkæs would at that period have been much annoyed if any one had told him beforehand with what compassion the flourishing state of his trading enterprises was one day to be described by me, and, as a consequence, read by millions of persons in all time to come. He wanted no pity, and said, “If I am quite happy, why should you be pitying me?” The articles of household furniture which he had touched, as with the hand of death, or notched with his axe, like trees marked for cutting, were one by one duly felled and hauled away. The mirror, with the floral border, in the bedroom (which, luckily for itself, could not see itself in any other), was the first thing to be tolled out of the house by the passing- or vesper-bell, under the pall of an apron. Before he stationed it in the train of this dance of death, he proposed to Lenette a substitute for it, the checked calico mourning-dress, in order to accustom her to the idea. It was the “Censeo Carthaginem delendam” (I vote for the destruction of Carthage) which old Cato used to say daily in the senate after every speech.

Next the old arm-chair was got rid of bodily (not like Shakespeare’s arm-chair, which was weighed out by the ounce, like saffron, or in carats, like gold), and the firedog went in company with it. Siebenkæs had the wisdom to say, before they went away, “Censeo Carthaginem delendam,” i. e. “Wouldn’t it be better to pawn the checked calico?”

They could barely subsist for two days upon the dog and the chair.

And then the process of alchemical transmutation of metals was applied to the shaving-basin and the bedroom crockery, which were converted into table-money. Of course he previously said “Censeo.” It is scarcely worth the trouble, but I may just observe here how little fruit was born by this branch of trade; it was rather a woody branch than a fruit-bearing one.

The lean porcelain cow or butter-boat would scarcely have served as their nourishing milch cow for more than a day, if she had not been attended by seven potentates (that is to say, most miserable prints of them), who went “into the bargain,” but for whom the woman at the shop added some melted butter. Wherefore he said “Censeo.” Many of my readers must remember my mentioning that, a short time ago, when he was distributing sentences of death among the furniture, he did not take very much notice of certain table-napkins which were lying beside the checked calico dress. Now, however, he acted as screech-owl, or bird of death, and gallows-priest to them also, and routed them out all but a few. When they were gone, he remarked, in an incidental manner, shortly before Martinmas Day, that the napkin-press was still to the fore, though it was not very clear what was the use of it, as there was nothing for it to press.

“If such a thing should be necessary,” he said, “the press might very well get leave of absence on private affairs, until we get through the smoothing-press, oiling-press, and napkin-press of destiny, and come out all smooth and beautiful ourselves, and can stick the napkins into our button-holes on their return.” His first intention had even been to reverse the order of the funeral procession, and put the press in the van of it as avant-courier of the napkins, and in that event he would only have had to invert his syllogism (as well as his procession) in this way: “I don’t see what we can do with the napkins, or how we’re to press them and keep them smooth, till we get the press home again.”

I am most firmly convinced that the majority of people would have done as Lenette did with reference to my trade-consul Siebenkæs, and his Hanseatic confederation with everybody who dealt in anything—that is, clasped her hands above her head, and said, “Oh! the thoughtless, silly creature! he’ll soon be a beggar at this rate: the beautiful furniture!”

Firmian’s constant answer was—

“You would have me kneel down and howl, and tear my coat in lamentation, like a Jew—my coat, which is torn already and pull my hair out by the roots—that hair, which terror frequently causes to fall off in a single night. Isn’t it enough if you do the howling? Are you not my appointed præfica and keening-woman? Wife, I swear to you, and that as solemnly as if I were standing on pig’s bristles,[^[47]] that if it is the will of God, who has given me so light and merry a heart—if it be His will that I am to go about the town with eight thousand holes in my coat, and without a sole to either shoe or stocking that I am to go on always getting poorer and poorer” (here his eyes grew moist in spite of him, and his voice faltered), “may the devil take me and lash me to death with the tuft of his tail if I leave off laughing and singing; and anybody who pities me, I tell him to his face, is an ass. Good heavens! the apostles, and Diogenes, and Epictetus, and Socrates, had seldom a whole coat to their backs—never such a thing as a shirt—and shall a creature such as I let a hair of him turn grey for such a reason, in miserable PROVINCIALISTIC times such as these?”

Right, my Firmian! Have a proper contempt for the narrow heart-sacs of the big clothes-moths about you—the human furniture-boring worms. And ye, poor devils, who chance to be reading me—whether ye be sitting in colleges or in offices, or even in parsonage-houses, who perhaps haven’t got a hat without a hole in it to put on your heads, most certainly haven’t got a black one—rise above the effeminate surroundings of your times to the grand Greek and Roman days, wherein it was thought no disgrace to a noble human creature to have neither clothes nor temple, like the statue of Hercules; take heed only that your soul shares not the poverty of your outward circumstances; lift your faces to heaven with pride—a sickly faint northern Aurora is veiling it, but the eternal stars are breaking through the thin blood-red storm!

It was but a few weeks now to the St. Andrew’s Day shooting-match, which was Lenette’s consolation in all her troubles, and to which all her wishes were directed; however, there came one day on which she was something worse than melancholy—inconsolable.

This was Michaelmas: on that day the press was to have followed Lenette’s Salzburg emigrants, the napkins, as their lady superior; but nobody in all the town would have anything to do with it. The sole anchor of refuge was one Jew, because there was no species of animal (in the shape of articles of merchandise) which did not flee to his Noah’s ark of a shop. Unfortunately, however, the day when the napkin-press applied to him was a Jewish feast-day, which he kept more strictly than ever he did his word. He said he would see about it to-morrow.

Permit me, if you please, to take this opportunity of making a few remarks of importance. Is it not a piece of most culpable negligence on the part of the Government that, seeing the Jews are, as it were, farmers-general and metal-kings of the Christians in German states, the days of their feasts and fasts, and other times connected with their worship, are not published and clearly made known for the benefit of those very numerous persons who wish to borrow of them, or have any business to transact with them? Those who suffer most from this omission are just the upper circles of society, persons of birth and rank, officials of high position; these are the persons who bring papers and want money on Feasts of Haman, Feasts of Esther, of the Destruction of the Temple, of the Rejoicing of the Law, and can’t obtain any. Surely the Jewish festivals, with the hours at which they begin and end, ought to be given in every almanack—as they have been fortunately, for a considerable time, in those of Berlin and Bavaria—or in newspapers—or be proclaimed by the crier, and carefully taught in schools. The Jew, indeed, has no need of a calendar of our festivals, since we are always ready to put off and postpone, if he likes, every Sunday of the year, though it were the first Sunday of it, the feast of the Jewish Circumcision; and consequently hereafter, when the universal monarchy of the Jews is actually established, he won’t take the trouble to append a Christian calendar to his own Jewish calendars, as we now append the Jewish to our Christian. The necessity, however, of inculcating in our schools a better and more exact acquaintance with the seasons of the Jewish festivals, and with their religious observances in general, will not be so fully manifest until hereafter, when the Jews shall have elevated Germany to the proud position of being their Land of Promise, leaving us to make our crusade, and our return to the Asiatic land of promise, if we feel disposed—to a holy sepulchre, and a sacred Calvary.

And yet I think (to close this digression by another) that hereafter, when we become the Christian numerators of Jewish denominators, we should be wrong to set out, as modern crusaders, for the holy land, as to which the Jews themselves trouble their heads but little. It is certain that they will treat us with a far wider measure of the spirit of tolerance than we, unfortunately, have extended to them; but their genius for commerce, which they have hitherto been so much reproached with, will be found to prove itself a guardian angel for us poor Christians, and to take us under its tutelage, inasmuch as we are so indispensably necessary to them as purchasers and consumers of the unprepared hindquarters of the cattle (for it is only the fore-quarters which they may eat, unless the veins are all taken out). Who else but Christians can take the place of the beasts of burden—as no animal may be degraded by working on the “Schabbes”[^[48]] (Sabbath)—and perform the necessary draught and other labour? and to whom are they to entrust the performance of menial and manual employments, like the ancient republicans, but to us, their nobler slaves and helots, whom they will, therefore, be sure to treat with more consideration than they have heretofore treated us when we have omitted to pay our promissory notes as they became due.

I return to our poor’s advocate, and record that on Michaelmas Day he could get no money, and consequently no Michaelmas goose. Lenette’s grief at the absence of the goose of her ecclesiastical communion we must all share. Women, who care less about eating and drinking than the most ascetic philosophers—caring, indeed, more about the latter themselves than about the former—are at the same time not to be controlled if they have to go without certain chronological articles of diet. Their natural liking for burgherly festivities brings it about that they would rather go without the appointed hymns and the gospel of the day than without butter-cakes at Christmas, cheesecakes at Easter, the goose at Michaelmas; their stomachs require a particular cover for each festival, like Catholic altars. So that the canonical dish is a kind of secondary sacrament, which, like the primary one, they take, not for the palate’s sake, but “by reason of the ordinance.” Antoninus and Epictetus could provide Siebenkæs with no efficient substitute for the goose, with which to console the weeping Lenette, who said, “We really are Christians, whatever you may say, and belong to the Lutheran Church; and every Lutheran has a goose on his table to-day—I’m sure my poor dear father and mother always had. As for you, you believe in nothing.” Whether he believed in anything or not, however, he slipped off, though it was the afternoon of the Jewish feast-day, to the Jew, who kept a nice pen of geese, with livers both fat and lean, serving as a post-stable for country friends of his own religion. When he went into his place he pulled a duodecimo Hebrew Bible out of his pocket and put it down on the table, with the words, “It was a great pleasure to him to meet with a keen, diligent, student of the law; to such a man it would be a real satisfaction to make a present of his Bible, without asking a halfpenny for it; as it was, an unpointed edition (that is to say, one without vowels), he couldn’t read it himself, especially as even if it had had points, he couldn’t have managed it. This napkin-press of mine, here”—he said, producing it from under his coat-tails “I should be very glad if you would allow me to leave with you, because I find it a good deal in my way at home; I don’t quite know what to do with it. You see, I have particular reasons for being anxious to get hold of a goose out of your pen; I don’t mind if it’s as thin as a whipping-post. If you like, you may call it giving it to me in charity on a holy day of this sort, for all I care; it’ll make no difference to me. If I should ever come and take away the press again, it’ll be an easy matter, and it’ll be time enough, to go into the transaction afresh.”

It was thus that, in order to secure his wife the free exercise of her religious observances, he brought in this goose of controversy, which seemed to have some polemical bearing, as well as to be connected with distinctive doctrines of faith; and next day these two Doctor Martin Lutherists ate up the Schmalkaldian article (and, indeed, another Schmalkaldian article, a commercial one—cold iron, namely—has often been employed in defence of the articles of theology). Thus was the capitol of the Lutheran religion saved, in an easy manner, by the bird, which was roasted (so to speak) at the fire of an auto-da-fé.

But on this particular morning up came the wigmaker, an individual whom he was delighted to see generally, though not to-day, for on the day before, Michaelmas, the quarter’s house rent was due, as we may remember. The Friseur presented himself as a sort of mute bill “at sight;” yet he was polite enough not to ask for anything. He merely mentioned, in a casual manner, that “there was going to be an auction of a variety of things on the Monday before St. Andrew’s Day, and in case the advocate might care to get together a few things for it, he thought he would give him notice of it, as he held a life appointment from the Houses of Assembly as auction-crier.”

He was scarcely down stairs before Lenette gave deep, but not loud, expression to her woes, saying he had “dunned them now, and that the whole house must know all about their disreputable style of housekeeping: had he not talked about furniture?” It was incomprehensible how the poor woman could have fancied anybody had been in the dark about it before! Poor people are always the first to nose out poverty. At the same time Firmian had been ashamed to tell the Friseur that he had been obliged to appoint himself auctioneer of his own furniture. Here he perceived that he blushed for his poverty more before one person, and before the poor, than he did before a whole town, and before the rich; and he flew into a furious indignation with these execrable eructations of human vanity in his noblest parts.

The path from hence to St. Andrew’s Day, all bordered with nothing but thistles as it is, cannot possibly seem longer, even to the reader, than it did to my hero, who, moreover, had to take hold of the thistles and pull them up with his own hands. The garden of his life kept getting more and more like a jardin Anglais, where only prickly and barren trees, but no fruit-trees, were to be found.

Every night, when he opened the latch of his bed-railings, he would say, with great enjoyment, to his Lenette, “Only twenty (or nineteen, or eighteen, or seventeen) days now to the shooting-match.” But the hairdresser and auction-crier had played the deuce and all with Lenette, though the evenings were long and dark and splendidly convenient for needy borrowers on deposit, veiling and hiding the naked, abashed, misery of the poor; she was ashamed the people in the house should know, and afraid to meet them. Firmian, who was astonished equally at the inexhaustible resources of his brain and of his house, and who kept saying to himself, “Do you know, I’m really curious to see what I shall hit upon to-day again, and how I shall manage to get out of this difficulty now—” Firmian, a day or two after the Michaelmas dinner, got his eye upon two more good articles of furniture—a long cask-siphon and a rocking-horse (a relic of his childhood). “We haven’t a cask, and we haven’t a baby,” he said. But his wife implored him, for heaven’s sake, “not to put her to this shame. The horse and the siphon” (she said) “are things that would stick out of the basket so terribly, or out from under one’s apron, and in the moonlight everybody would see them.”

And yet something must go! Firmian said, in an odd cutting, yet sorrowful way, “It must be so! Fate, like Pritzel,[^[49]] is beating on the bottom of the drum, and the oats are jumping on the top of it; we have got to eat off the drum.”

“Anything,” she said, faint and beaten, “except things that stick out so.” She searched about, opened the top drawer of the cupboard, and took out a faded wreath of artificial flowers: she said, “Rather take this!” and neither smiled nor wept! He had often looked at it; but as he had sent it to her himself last New Year’s Day, the day of their betrothal, and because it was so romantically beautiful (a white rose, two red rosebuds, and a border of forget-me-nots) every fibre of that tender heart of his would have stood out against parting with this pretty relic—this memorial of better, happier, days. The patient, resigned way in which she made the sacrifice of these poor old flowers tore his heart in two. “Lenette!” he said, moved beyond expression—“why, you know, these are our betrothal flowers!”

“Well, who’s to be any the wiser,” she said, quite cheerfully and quite coolly. “You see they’re not so big as other things are.”

“Have you forgotten, then quite,” he stammered, “what I told you these flowers meant?”

“Let me see,” the said, more coldly still, and proud of the goodness of her memory, “the forget-me-nots mean that I’m not to forget you, and that you won’t forget me—the buds mean happiness—no, no, the buds mean happiness that’s not quite all come yet—and the white rose—I don’t recollect now what the white rose means——”

“It means pain” (he said, overwhelmed with emotion), “and innocence, and sorrow, and a poor white face.” He clasped her in his arms, as the tears came to his eyes, and cried, “Oh! poor darling! poor darling! What can I do? It’s all beyond me! I should like to give you everything the world contains, and I have nothing——”

He ceased suddenly, for while his arms were round her, she had shut up the drawer of the cupboard, and was looking at him with calm, clear, gentle eyes, not the trace of a tear in them. She resumed her petition in the old tone saying, “I may keep the siphon and the horse, mayn’t I? We shall get more money for the flowers.” What he said was, “Lenette! Oh, darling Lenette,” over and over again, each time more tenderly.

“But why not?” she asked, more gently each time, for she didn’t understand him in the least. “I had sooner pawn the coat off my back,” was his answer. But as she now got the alarming idea into her head that what he was driving at was the calico gown, and as this put her into a great state, and as she immediately began to inveigh warmly against all pledging of large articles; and as he clearly perceived that her previous coldness had been thoroughly genuine, and not assumed, he knew, alas! the very worst, a grief which no sweet drops of philosophy could avail to alleviate, namely—she either loved him no longer, or, she had never really loved him at all.

The sinews of his arms were now fairly cut in two, the sinews of his arms which had till now kept misfortune at bay. In the prostration of this his (spiritual) putrid fever he could say nothing but—“Whatever you please, dear; it’s all the same to me now.”

Upon that, she went out delighted, and quickly, to old Sabel, but came back again immediately. This pleased him; sorrow having gnawed deeper into his heart during the three moments she was gone, he could follow up the bitter speech with these quiet words: “Put up your marriage wreath along with the other flowers, there’ll be a little more weight, and a little more money for it; though it is nothing like such pretty work as my flowers.”

“My marriage wreath?” cried Lenette, colouring with anger, while two bitter tears burst from her eyes. “No, that I positively shall NOT let go, it shall be put with me into my coffin, as my poor dear mother’s was. Did you not take it up in your hand from the table on my wedding-day, when I had taken it off to have my hair powdered, and say you thought quite as much of it as you did of the marriage ceremony itself, if not more? (I noticed what you said very carefully, and remember it quite distinctly). No, no, I am your wife, at all events, and I shall never let that wreath go as long as I live.”

His emotion now took a new bent, one more in harmony with hers, but he masked this behind the question, “What made you come back in such a hurry?” It was that old Sabel had just been in at the bookbinder’s, it seemed, and Herr von Meyern had been there too. That young gentleman was in the habit of getting off his horse and dropping in, partly to see what new books the ladies were having bound at the bookbinder’s, and in what sort of pretty bindings, partly to stick up his leg with its riding boot upon the cobbler’s bench and get him to stitch a top tighter, asking about all sorts of things during the process. The world—(which expression can only mean the collection of female tongue-threshers of empty straw belonging to Kuhschnappel)—may undoubtedly conclude, if it be so minded, the Venner to be a regular Henry the Fowler with respect to more women than one in the house, the latter being a feminine Volière to him; but I want proofs of this. Lenette, however, didn’t trouble herself about any proofs, but piously fled out of the way of Rosa the birdcatcher.

I further relate (doing so, moreover, without any very marked blush for the mutability of the human heart) that at this point Firmian’s compressed thoracic cavity grew several inches wider, so as to give admission to a considerable modicum of happiness, for no other reason but that Lenette had kept such a tight grasp of her marriage-wreath, and had endured the Venner for so short a time. “She is faithful, at all events, although she may be rather cool; in fact, I don’t really believe she is a bit cool, either, after all.” So that he was quite pleased that she should have her way (which was his also) about keeping the wedding-wreath in the house and in her heart. Besides which, without contending further about the betrothal-wreath, he let her have that other way of hers, though less willingly—this being a proceeding which hurt his feelings only, not hers. His old flower keepsake was accordingly deposited in the hands of an obliging lady who rejoiced in the title of “Appraiser,” on the solemn understanding that it was to be redeemed with the very first dollar which should drop from the bird-pole on St. Andrew’s Day.

The blood-money of these silken flowers was so parcelled out as to be made available by way of stepping-stones in the muddy path leading to the Sunday before the shooting-match. This Sunday (the 27th November, 1785) was to be followed by the Monday for which the auction had been announced; on the Wednesday he (and I hope all of us with him) would be in his place in front of the bird-pole.

It is true, however, that on the Sunday he had to ford a stream swollen to a considerable extent by rainy weather; we will go through it after him, but I give due notice that, in the middle, it is pretty deep.

The stomach of his inner man evinced a wonderful disrelish, and exhibited a reversed peristaltic motion towards everything in the shape of pawning, since the affair of the flowers. The reason was—there was nothing more to which he could refer his wife. At first, he used to refer her to the shooting-match; but when the mortar and the chair had evacuated the fortress without tuck of drum, they not being articles of a sort to be obtained as prizes for shooting, he took to referring her to public auctions at which he could always buy what he might require at about half price. Finally, though still referring her to auctions, he did so no longer with a view to import, but to export, trade—as a seller, rather than as a buyer, of commodities; in which respect he surpasses Spain.

He who has risen victorious over great and serious attacks of an insulting or offensive nature, has often had to yield to very small and trifling ones; and so it is with our troubles. The stout, firm heart, which has beat strongly on all through long years of bitter trial and affliction, will often break at once, like over-flooded ice, at some lightest touch of Fortune’s foot. Till now, Siebenkæs had carried himself erect, and borne his burden without a bend, ay, and with a merrier heart than many a man. Up to this hour, he really hadn’t minded the whole affair one single button. Had he not (merely to mention one or two instances) pointed out that, in the matter of clothes, he was better off than the Emperor of Germany, who (he said) had nothing to put on, on his coronation-day in Frankfort, but a frightful old cast-off robe of Charles the Great’s, not much better than Rabelais’s old gown, though that was not by several centuries so old as the Imperial one? And once when his wife was sadly looking over his fading perennial clothes flora, he told her all she had to do was to suppose he was serving in the new world with a thousand or so of other Anspach men, and the ship which was bringing out their new uniforms had been captured by the enemy, so that the whole force had nothing to put on but what they would have preferred to have been able to take off. Likewise that what he had had to go upon, and to take his stand upon for a considerable time past, had been something much superior to his own pair of boots (by this he clearly meant pure apathy); as for his boots, they, having been twice new fronted, had been shoved in like pocket telescopes, or trombones, till they had become a pair of fair halt-boots; just as the German corpora, also, by the influence of long years of civilisation and culture, have got considerably taken in, the long rifle having been docked into a short, or non-commissioned officers’ rifle.

But on the Sunday to which I am alluding, he was far too much scared at the sight of one single bird of prey and of ill omen, flying athwart the lonely Sahara desert in which his life was passing. He himself was taken by surprise at this alarm of his; he would have expected anything else but alarm under the circumstances. For as it had hitherto been his custom to prepare himself for dark and tragic scenes by comedy rehearsals of them—by which I mean, that he carefully read up, beforehand, all the legal steps which Herr von Blaise could take against him, thus taking up, in sport, and in advance, the burdens which the future had in store—it astonished him greatly to find that an ill, quite certain to come, and clearly foreseen, should prove to have longer thorns, when it came up towards him out of the future, than it seemed to possess while still at a distance.

So that when, on the Sunday, the messenger of the Inheritance Office came, with the long-expected THIRD dilatory plea of the Heimlicher, and with the third affirmatory decree written on the face thereof, as his breast was in the condition of a vacuum (no air to breathe in it) before his coming, his poor heart grew sick and breathless indeed, when this fresh stroke of the air-pump exhausted the receiver even more thoroughly than it had been emptied before.

Amid the multiplicity of matters which it has been my duty to report to the public, I have omitted, on purpose, all mention of the second of Mr. Blaise’s dilatory pleas, because I thought I might assume that every reader who has had as much as half a ship’s pound weight of legal documents through his hands—or one single settlement of law accounts—would take it for granted, as a matter of course, that the first petition for delay would infallibly be followed by a second. It reflects much discredit on our administration of justice that every upright, honourable counsel finds himself compelled to adduce such a number of reasons (I wish I might say “lies”) before he can be accorded the smallest, necessary term of delay; he has got to say his children and his wife are dying; that he has met with all kinds of unfortunate accidents, and has thousands of things to do, journeys to make, and sicknesses. Whereas it ought to be quite enough for him to say that the preparation of the innumerable petitions for delay with which he is overwhelmed, leaves him little time to write anything else. People ought to notice that these petitions for delay tend, as all other petitions do, to the protracting of the suit, just as all the wheels of a watch work together to retard the principal wheel. A slow pulse is a sign of longevity not only in human beings but in lawsuits. It seems to me that an advocate who has any conscience is glad to do what he can to promote the length of life in his opponent’s suit—not in his own client’s, he would make an end of that in a minute if he could—partly to punish the said opponent, partly to terrify him, or else to snatch, from his grasp a favourable judgment (a sort of thing as to which nobody can form an idea whether it is likely or not)—for as many years as possible; just as in ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ the people who had a black mark on their brow were doomed to the torture of eternal life. The object of the man of business on the opposite side is a similar prolongation of the war to his opponents, and thus the two counsel immesh the two clients in a long drag-net of documents, &c., each with the best possible intentions. On the whole, lawyers are not so indifferent to the question, “What is the law?” as to the question, “What is justice?” For which reason they prefer arguing to writing; as Simonides, when he was asked by the king the question, “What is God?” begged for a day to consider his answer—then for another day—then for another—and for another, and always for another, because no man’s life is sufficient to answer that question—so the jurist, when he is asked, “What is justice?” keeps continually asking for more and more delays—he can never reply to the question—indeed, if the judges and clients would let him, he would gladly devote his whole life to writing replies to a legal question of this sort. Advocates are so used to this way of looking at matters, that it never strikes them that there is anything unusual about it.

I return to my story. This blow of the iron secular arm, with its six long thief- and writing-fingers, all but felled Siebenkæs to the earth. The vapours about his path in life condensed to morning mist, the morning mist to evening clouds, the clouds to showers of rain. “Many a poor devil has more to do than he can manage,” he said. If he had had a pleasant, cheerful wife, he would not have said this; but one such as his, who painfully trailed her cross (instead of taking it up), and was all lamentations—an elegiac poetess, a Job’s comforter—was herself a second cross to bear.

He set to work and thought the whole thing over; he had hardly enough left to buy the next year’s almanack, or a bundle of Hamburgh quills (for his satires used up Lenette’s feather dusters much more than his own energies, so that he often thought of cutting Stiefel’s red pipe-stalk into a pen); he would have been delighted to convert his plates into something to eat (there were none left, however), following the example of the Gauls, who used round pieces of bread as plates first, and afterwards as dessert; or of the Huns, who, after riding upon pieces of beef (by way of saddles) till it was partly cooked, dined upon these saddles. His half-boots would need to be new fronted, and abbreviated for the third time, before the arrival of the impending shooting-match day; and of the necessary requisites for the performance of that operation the only one in existence was the artist, Fecht the cobbler. In short, for that important occasion he had nothing to put on his back or in his pocket, his bullet-pouch, or his powder-horn.

When a man intentionally works his anxieties and apprehensions up to the highest possible pitch, some consolation is sure to fall upon his heart from heaven, like a drop of warm rain. Siebenkæs began catechising himself more strictly, asking himself what it really was that he was tormenting himself about. Nothing but the fear of having to go to the shooting-match without money, without powder and shot, and without having had his boots abbreviated for the third time! “Is that really all?” he said. “And what, if you please, is there to make it a compulsory matter that I should go there at all? I’ll tell you what it is” (he went on to himself), “I am the monkey complaining bitterly that, having stuck his hand into a narrow-mouthed bottle of rice, and filled it, he can’t pull it out without a corkscrew. All I’ve got to do is to sell my rifle and my shooting ticket; all I’ve got to do is to open my hand and draw it out empty.” So he made up his mind to take his rifle to the barber on the day of the auction to be put up to sale.

All battered, bruised, and weary with the day, he climbed into his bed, with the thought of which safe and sheltered anchoring ground he consoled himself all day long. “There is this blessed property about night,” he said, as he sat and spread the feathers of his quilt level, “that while it lasts we need trouble ourselves neither about candles, coals, victuals, drink, debts, nor clothes; all we want is a bed. A poor fellow is in peace and comfort as long as he is lying down: and, luckily, he has only got to stand for half of his time.”

The attacks of syncope, to which our souls and our cheerfulness are subject, cease, as those of the body do (according to Zimmermann), when the patient is placed in a horizontal position.

Had his bed been provided with bed-tassel, I should have called it the capstan, whereby he heaved himself slowly up on the Monday morning from his resting place. When he got up, he ascended to the garret, where his rifle was nailed up in an old, long field-chest, to keep it safe. This rifle was a valuable legacy from his father, who had been huntsman and gun-loader to a great prince of the empire. He took a crowbar, and, using it as a lever, prised up the lid with its roots, i. e. nails; and the first thing he saw in it was a leather arm, which “gave him quite a turn;” for he had had many a good thrashing from that arm in bygone days.

It will not take me too far out of my way to expend a word or two on this subject. This full-dress arm had been borne by Siebenkæs’s father on his body (as it might be in the field of his escutcheon) ever since the time when he had lost his natural arm in the military service of the before-mentioned prince, who, as some slight reward, had got him his appointment as gun-loader to his corps of Jägers. The gun-loader wore this auxiliary arm fastened to a hook on his left shoulder; it being more like the arm of a Hussar’s pelisse, or an elongated glove, worn by way of ornament, than as a mouth Christian of an arm (pretending to be what it was not). In the education of his children, however, the leather arm served, to some extent, the purpose of a school library and Bible Society, and was the collaborateur of the fleshly arm. Every-day shortcomings—for instance, when Firmian made a mistake in his multiplication, or rode on the pointer dog, or ate gunpowder, or broke a pipe—were punished not severely, that is, only with a stick, which in all good schools runs up the backs of the children by way of capillary sap-vessel or siphon, to supply the nourishing juice of knowledge; or is the carriage-pole to which entire winter-schools are harnessed, and at which they tug with a will. But there were two other sorts of transgressions which he punished more severely. When one of the children laughed at table during meals, or hesitated, or made a blunder during the long table-grace or evening prayers, he would immediately amputate his adventitious arm with his natural one, and administer a tremendous thrashing to the little darling.

Firmian remembered, as if it had happened yesterday, one occasion when he and his sisters had been thrashed, turn about, for a whole half-hour at dinner-time with the battle-flail, because one of them began to laugh while the long muscle was swishing about the ears of another, who was serious enough. The sight of the bit of leather made his heart burn even at this day. I can quite see the advantage to parents and teachers who try the expedient of unhooking an empty by an organic arm, and smiting a pupil with this species of Concordat, and alliance between the temporal and spiritual arms; but this mode of punishment ought to be invariably the one made use of; for there is nothing which infuriates children more than anything new in the way of instruments of punishment, or a new mode of application of those in general use. A child who is accustomed to rulers and blows on the back, must not be set upon with boxes on the ear and bare hands; nor one accustomed to the latter treated to the former. The author of these Flower-pieces had once a slipper thrown at him in his earlier days. The scar of that slipper is still fresh in his heart, whereas he has scarcely any recollection of lickings of the ordinary sort.

Siebenkæs pulled the arm of punishment and the rifle out of the chest; but what a treasure trove there was beneath them! Here was help, indeed! At all events he could go to the shooting-match in shorter boots, and eat whatever he liked for some days to come. What most astonishes both him and me in this affair (it is easily explicable, however) is that he had never thought of it sooner, inasmuch as his father was a Jäger; while, on the other hand, I must confess it could not have happened on a luckier day, because it chanced to be just the day of the auction.

The hunting spear, the horse’s tail, the decoy bird, the fox-trap, the couteau de chasse, the medicine-chest, the fencing mask and foil—a collection of things which he had never had a thought of looking for in the chest—could be taken over instantly to the town-house, and set up to auction on the spot by the hairdressing Saxon.

It was done accordingly. After all his troubles, the little piece of good luck warmed and gladdened his heart. He went himself after the box—which was sent just as it stood to the auction, except that the rifle and the leathern artery were kept back—to hear what would be offered for the things.

He took up his position (on account of the excessive length of his half-boots) at the back of the auctioneer’s table, close to his hectic landlord. The sight of this pile of heterogeneous goods and chattels all heaped up higgledy-piggledy (as if some grand conflagration were raging, and it had been collected in haste for safety; or as if it were the plunder of some captured city), goods and chattels sold, for the most part, by people on the downward path to poverty, and bought by those who had arrived at poverty already—had the effect of making him contemn and despise more every moment all this complex pumping apparatus, this machinery for keeping the spring-wells of a few petty, feeble lives in clear and vigorous flow; and he himself, the engineer and driver of this machinery, felt his sense of manliness grow stronger. He was furious with himself, because his soul had seemed yesterday to be but a sham jewel, which a drop of aquafortis deprives of its colour and lustre, whereas a real jewel never loses either.

Nothing awakens our humour more, nor renders us more utterly indifferent to the honour paid to mere rank and worldly position, than our being in any manner compelled to fall back upon the honour due to ourselves (independently of our chance position), our own intrinsic worth, our being compelled to tar over our inner being with philosophy (as if it were a Diogenes’ tub), by way of protection against injuries from without; or (in a prettier metaphor) when, like pearl oysters, we have to exude pearls of maxims to fill the holes which worms bore in our mother-of-pearl. Now pearls are better than uninjured mother-of-pearl; an idea which I should like to have written in letters of gold.

I have good reasons of my own for prefacing what has to follow with all this philosophy, because I want to get the reader into such a frame of mind that he may not make too great a fuss about what the advocate is going to do now: it was really nothing but a harmless piece of fun. As the be-powdered lungs of the auctioneer were more adapted to wheezing and coughing than to shouting, he took the auction-hammer from this hammer-man and sold off the things himself. True, he only did it for about half an hour, and only auctioned his own things; and even then he would have thought twice about taking the hammer in hand and setting to work, if it hadn’t been such an indescribable delight to him to hold up the horse’s tail, the spear, the decoy-bird, &c., and hammer on the table and cry, “Four groschen for the horse’s tail, once! five kreuzer for the decoy, twice!—going! Half-a dollar for the fox-trap, once! two gulden for this fine foil, twice! two gulden—going—going—and gone!” He did what it is an auctioneer’s duty to do, he praised the goods. He turned the horse’s tail over and over, and opened it out before the huntsmen who were at the sale (the shooting-match had attracted many from a distance, as carrion does vultures), stroked it with and against the hair, and said there was enough of it to make snares for all the blackbirds in the Black Forest. He held up the decoy-bird in its best light, exhibiting to the company its wooden beak, its wings, talons, and feathers, and only wished there were a hawk present, that he might bait the decoy and lure it.

The entries in his housekeeping account-book, which, on account of the wretchedness of my memory, I have had to refer to twice, show that the sum received from the huntsmen amounted to seven florins and some groschen. This does not include the medicine-chest nor the long-necked mask; for nobody would have anything to say to them. When he went home he poured the whole of this crown-treasure and sinking-fund into Lenette’s gold satchel, taking occasion to warn her and himself of the dangers of great riches, and holding up to both the example of those who are arrogant by reason of wealth, and must therefore of necessity, sooner or later, come to ruin.

In my Seventh Chapter, which I shall commence immediately, I shall at length be able, after all these thousands of domestic worries and miseries, to conduct the learned world of Germany to the shooting-ground and present to them my hero as a worthy member of the shooting-club, with a rifle and bullets, and properly and respectably—well, booted, more than attired for his bullets are cast, his rifle cleaned, and his boots have put on their shoes, Fecht having stitched, on his knee, the three-quarter boots down to half-boots, and soled them with the—leather arm, of which enough has been said already.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SHOOTING-MATCH—ROSA’S AUTUMNAL CAMPAIGN—CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING CURSES, KISSES, AND THE MILITIA.

There is nothing which so much inconveniences me, or is so much to the prejudice of this story (so beautiful in itself), as the fact that I have made a resolution to restrict it within the compass of four alphabets. I have thus, by my own act, deprived myself of everything in the shape of room for digressions. I find myself, metaphorically, in a somewhat similar position to one which I once found myself in, without metaphor, on an occasion when I was measuring the diameter and circumference of the town of Hof. On that occasion I had fastened a Catel’s pedometer by a hook to the waistband of my trousers and the silken cord which runs down the thigh to a curved hook of steel at my knee, so that the three indexes on one dial (of which the first marks a hundred steps, the second a thousand, and the third up to twenty thousand) were all moving just as I moved myself. At this moment I met a young lady, whom it was incumbent on me that I should see home. I begged her to excuse me, as I had a Catel’s pedometer on, and had already made a certain number of steps towards my measurement of the diameter of Hof. “You see, in a moment,” I said, “how I am situated. The pedometer, like a species of conscience, records all the steps I take; and, with a lady, I shall be obliged to take shorter steps, besides thousands of sideway and backward steps, all of which the pedometer will put to the account of the diameter. So, you see, I am afraid it’s quite impossible that I can have the pleasure of——” However, this only made her the more determined that I should, and I was well laughed at; but I screwed myself to the spot, and wouldn’t stir. At last I said I would go home with her, pedometer and all, if she would just read off my indexes for me (seeing I couldn’t twist myself down low enough to see the dial)—read them off for me twice—firstly, then and there, and secondly, when we got to her house—so that I might deduct the steps taken by me in this young lady’s company from the size of Hof. This agreement was honestly kept; and this little account of the occurrence may be of service to me some day if ever I publish (as I have not given up all hopes of doing) my perspective sketch of the town of Hof; and townspeople who saw me walking with the said young lady, and with the pedometer trailing at my knee, might cast it in my teeth and say it was a lame affair, and that nobody could calculate as to the steps he might take in a lady’s company, far less apply them to the measurement of a town.

St. Andrew’s Day was bright and fine, and not very windy. It was tolerably warm, and there wasn’t as much snow in the furrows as would have cooled a nutshell of wine, or knocked over a humming-bird. On the previous Tuesday Siebenkæs had been looking on with the other spectators, when the bird-pole had described its majestic arc in descending to impale the black golden eagle with outstretched wings, and rise again therewith on high. He felt some emotion as the thought struck him, “That bird of prey up there holds in his claws, and will dispense, the happiness or the misery of thy Lenette’s coming weeks, and our goddess of Fortune has transformed herself and dwindled into that black form, nothing left of her but her WINGS and BALL.”

On St. Andrew’s morning, as he said good-bye to Lenette, with kisses, and in his abbreviated boots, over which he had a pair of goloshes, she said, “May God grant you luck, and not let you do any mischief with your rifle.” She asked several times if there was nothing he had forgotten—his eyeglass, or his handkerchief, or his purse; “And mind you don’t get into any quarrel with Mr. von Meyern,” was her parting counsel: and finally, as one or two preliminary thundrous drum-ruffles were heard from the direction of the courthouse, she added most anxiously, “For God’s sake, mind and don’t shoot yourself; my blood will run cold the whole forenoon every time I hear a gun go off!”

At length the long thread of riflemen, rolled up like a ball, began to unwind itself, and the waving line, like a great serpent, moved off in surging convolutions to the sound of trumpets and drums. A banner represented the serpent’s crest, and the standard-bearer’s coat was like a second flag beneath the other. The town-soldiery, more remarkable for quality than for quantity, shot the mottled line of competitors at intervals with the white of their uniforms. The auctioneering hairdresser—the only member of the lower ten thousand who rejoiced in a powdered head—tripped along, keeping the white peak of his cap at the due degree of distance from the leather pigtails of the aristocracy, which he had that morning tied and powdered. The multitude felt what a lofty position in this world really was, when, with bent heads, they raised their eyes to Heimlicher von Blaise, the director of the competition, who accompanied the procession in his capacity of aorta of the whole arterial system, or elementary fire of all these ignes-fatui—or, in a word, as master of the shooters’ lodge. Happy was the wife who peeped out and saw her husband marching past in the procession—happy was Lenette, for her husband was there, and looked gallantly up as he passed by. His short boots looked very nice, indeed; they were made both in the old fashion and in the new, and, like man, had put on the new (short) Adam over the old one.

I wish Schulrath Stiefel had given a thought or so to the St. Andrew’s shooting-match, and looked out of his window at his Orestes; however, he went on with his reviewing.

Now, when these processional caterpillars had crept together again at the shooting-ground, as upon a leaf—when the eagle hung in his heavenly eyrie, like the crest of the future’s armorial bearings—when the wind instruments, which the troop of “wandering minstrels” had scarce been able to hold firmly to their lips, blared out their loudest now that the band was halted, and as the procession, with martial tramp and rattle of grounded rifles, came with a rush into the empty echoing shooting-house, everybody, strictly speaking, was more or less out of his senses, and mentally intoxicated; and that although the lots were not even drawn, far less any shot fired. Siebenkæs said to himself, “The whole thing is stuff and nonsense, yet see how it has gone to all our heads, and how a mere unbroken faded flower-wreath of pleasant trifles, wound ten times about our hearts, half chokes and darkens them. Our thirsty heart is made of loose, absorptive mould; a warm shower makes it swell, and as it expands it cracks the roots of all the plants that are growing in it.”

Mr. von Blaise, who smiled unceasingly upon my hero, and treated the others with the rudeness becoming authority, ordered the lots to be drawn which were to decide the order in which the competitors were to shoot. The reader cannot expect Chance to stop the wheel of Fortune, thrust in her hand, and, behind her bandage, pull out from among seventy numbers the very first for the advocate; she drew him the twelfth, however. And at length the brave Germans and imperial citizens opened fire upon the Roman eagle. At first they aimed at his crown. The eagerness and zeal of these pretenders were proportioned to the importance of the affair: was there not a royal revenue of six florins attached to this golden penthouse when the bullet brought it down—to say nothing whatever of other crown property, consisting of three pounds of tow and a pewter shaving-dish. The fellows did what they could; but the rifle placed the crown of the eagle, not, alas! on our hero’s head, but upon that of No. 11, his predecessor, the hectic Saxon. He had need of it, poor fellow! seeing that, like a Prince of Wales, he had come into possession of the crown debts sooner than of the crown itself.

At a shooting contest of this kind nothing is better calculated to dissipate everything in the shape of tedium than to have arrangements made for “running shooting” (as it is called) being carried on by those who are waiting their turn at the birdpole. A man who has to wait while sixty-nine other people slowly aim and shoot before his turn comes round, may find a good deal to amuse him if, during that time, he can load and aim at something of a less lofty kind—for instance, a Capuchin general. The “running” or “swing” shooting, as carried out at Kuhschnappel, differs in no respect from that of other places. A piece of canvas is hung up, and floats to and fro; there are painted dishes of edibles upon it, as on a table-cloth, and whoever puts a bullet through one of these paintings obtains the original—just as princes choose their brides from their portraits, before bringing home the brides in person; or as witches stick pins into a man’s image in order to wound the prototype himself. The Kuhschnappelers were, on this occasion, shooting at a portrait on this canvas, which a great many persons considered to represent a Capuchin general. I know that there were some who, basing their opinion chiefly upon the red hat in the portrait, considered it to represent a cardinal, or cardinal-protector, but these have clearly, in the first place, got to settle the point with a third party, which differed from both of those above mentioned, holding that it portrayed the whore of Babylon—that is to say, a European one. From all of which we may form a pretty accurate estimate of the amount of truth contained in another rumour—which I contradicted in the first hour of its existence—namely, that the Augsburg people had taken offence at this effigy-arquebusading, and had written, in consequence, to the attorney-general representing that they felt themselves aggrieved, and that it was an injustice to one religion if, within the bounds of the holy Roman empire, a general of a religious order should be shot to shivers, without a Lutheran superintendent general being also shot to shivers at the same time. I should certainly have heard something further about this, if it had been anything but mere wind. Indeed, I have a shrewd suspicion that the whole story is no more than a false tradition, or garbled version of another story, which a gentleman of rank belonging to Vienna recently lied to me at table. What he said was, that in the more considerable towns of the empire, where the spirit-level of religious toleration has established a beautiful equilibrium between Papists and Lutherans, many had complained, on the part of the Lutherans, of the circumstance that although there were equal numbers of night-watchmen and censors (that is, transcendental night-watchmen), keepers of hotels, and keepers of circulating libraries of each communion, yet there were more Papists hanged than Lutherans; so that it was very clear, whether the Jesuits had to do with it or not, that a high and important post such as the gallows was not filled with the same amount of impartiality as the Council of State, but with a certain bias towards the Catholics. I thought of contradicting the story, in the most distinct terms, in the ‘Literary Gazette’ of December last, but Government declined to pay the expense of the insertion.

However, although those who occupied themselves with the “swing” shooting did only have a Capuchin to aim at, the said swing shooting was every bit as important a business as the shooting at the standing mark. I must point out (in this connection) that there were edible prizes attached to the divers bodily members of this said general of his order, which had their attractions for riflemen of a reflective turn of mind. An entire Bohemian porker was the prize appointed for him who should pierce the heart of the Capuchin pasha—which heart, however, was represented by a spot no bigger than a beauty-patch—so that he who should hit this little mark would have need of all his skill and nerve. The cardinal’s hat was easier of attainment, for which reason it was worth only a couple of jack. The honorarium of the oculist who should succeed in inserting new (leaden) pupils into the cardinal’s eyes consisted of an equivalent number of geese. As he was portrayed in the full fervour of prayer, it was well worth anyone’s while to send a bullet through between his hands, seeing that this would be tantamount to knocking the two fore-quarters out of a cantering, smoked pig. And each of the cardinal’s feet rested upon a fine hind-quarter or ham. I do not hesitate for a moment—whatever the imperial burgh of Kuhschnappel may say to it—to record, with the utmost distinctness, that no portion of the whole lord-protector was more poorly endowed, or had a scantier revenue and salarium allotted to it, than his navel; for there was nothing to be got out of that, with however good a bullet, but a Bologna sausage.

The advocate had failed in his designs upon the crown; but fortune chucked him the cardinal’s hat to make up for it—the cardinal’s hat with two pike inside it. But some puissant necromantic spell of invulnerability turned all his bullets aside from the eagle’s head, and from the general’s too. He would fain have sent one eye, at any rate, out of the face of the harlot of Babylon, but he could not manage that either.

Now the prize-lists—which are correct, seeing that they were made out by the secretary, under the eyes of the president, Herr von Blaise—state with distinctness that the head, the ring in the beak, and the little flag, fell into the hands of numbers 16, 2, and 63.

The sceptre was now being aimed at; and Siebenkæs would have been very very glad, for his dear little wife’s sake (waiting for him now, as she was, with the soup), to have sent that, at least, flying out of the eagle’s talons, and to have fixed it, by way of a bayonet, on to his rifle.

All the numbers who had tried their best to break off this golden oak-branch had shot in vain, except the worst—the most to be dreaded of all—his own predecessor and landlord. He aimed, and shot—and the gilded harpoon quivered. Siebenkæs fired—and the eel-spear came tumbling down.

Messrs. Meyern and Blaise smiled, and uttered congratulations; the blowers of instruments, crooked and straight, blew, in honour of the advent of this new bird-member, a blast both loud and shrill (like the Karlsbad people, when a new bath-guest arrives), looking closely and carefully at their music as they did so, though they had played their little fanfares far oftener than the very night-watchmen. All the infantas—I mean all the children—began a race for the sceptre, but the buffoon dashed among them, and scattered them; and, taking up the sceptre, presented that emblem of sovereignty to the advocate with one hand, holding in the other his own emblem of sovereignty, the whip.

Siebenkæs contemplated with a smile the little twig of timber—the little branch, sticking to which the buzzing swarms of nations are so often borne away; and he veiled his satisfaction under cover of the following satirical remarks (which the reigning Heimlicher overheard, and applied to himself):—

“A very pretty little frog-shooter! It ought, by rights, to be a honey-gauge; but the poor bees are crushed by it, that their honey-bags may be got out of them! The Waiwodes and the despots, child-like, put the bees of the country to death, and take the honey from their stomachs, not from, their combs. A truly preposterous and absurd implement! It is made of wood; very likely a piece broken off a shepherd’s crook, and gilded, pointed, and notched—one of those shepherd’s staves with which the shepherds often drag the sheep’s fat out of them while they are feeding in the meadows!”

He had ceased to be conscious, now, when he emitted the bitterest satirical matter (there was never a drop of it in his heart); he often turned mere acquaintances into foes with some joke, made merely for the sake of jesting; and couldn’t imagine what made people vexed with him, and why it was that he couldn’t have his little bit of fun with them as well as any one else.

He put the sceptre into the breast of his coat and took it home, seeing that they would not shoot up to his number again before dinner-time. He held it up straight and stiff, as the king of diamonds holds his, and said to Lenette, “There’s a soup-ladle and sugar-tongs for you, all in one!” the allusion being to the two pewter prizes, which, in company with a sum of nine florins, had fallen to his share by way of sceptre-fief. It was enough for one shot. And next he gave an account of the catching of the pike. He expected that Lenette would, at the very least, go through the five dancing positions and execute Euler’s “knight’s move” on the chess-board of the room-floor, into the bargain, within the first five seconds after hearing the news. She did what she could do, namely, nothing at all; and said what she knew, namely, that the landlady had been holding forth, with bitter severity, to the bookseller’s wife, on the subject of the non-payment of the rent, and further, concerning her own husband, whom she characterised as a smooth-tongued flatterer and payer of compliments—a man who didn’t half threaten people. “What I tell you,” repeated the sceptre-bearer, “is, that I have this day had the luck to shoot a couple of pikes and a sceptre, Wendeline Engelkraut!” and he banged his sceptre-knout in indignation upon the table where the crockery was all set out. She answered at last, “Well, Lucas came running a short time ago and told me all about that; I am so glad about it, but I should quite think you will shoot a good many more things yet—will you not? I said so to the bookseller’s wife.”

She was slipping into her old cart-rut again, you see, but Firmian thought, “She can cry and mourn loud enough, but deuce a bit of gladness can she show when a fellow comes home with a pike or two under his arm, and a sceptre or so.” It was just the same with the wife of the gentle-hearted Racine, when he threw down a long purse of golden Louis XVI. he had got hold of, on the table.

How, or whence, oh! beloved wives, cometh to you the naughty trick ye have of making a kind of parade of an insupportable frigidity and indifference, just on the very occasions when your husbands come to you laden with good news, or with presents—that at the very moment when Fate brightens the wine of your joy into “bloom,” your vats grow turbid with the lees of the old liquor? Comes it from your custom of showing only one of your faces at a time, like your sister and prototype, the moon? or from a peevish discontent with destiny? or is its cause a sweet, delicious, overflowing happiness and gladness, making the heart too full and the tongue too hard to move?

I believe it is often from all these causes combined.

In men, again—sometimes, too, in women, but only in one out of a thousand—it may arise from the sad thought of the sharks which tear off the arm with which, down in the dark ocean, all breathless and anxious, we have clasped hold of four pearls of happiness. Or, perhaps, from a deeper question still. Is not our heart’s inward bliss but an olive-leaf which a dove brings to us, fluttering over the great deluge foaming and seething all round us—an olive-leaf which she has culled for us away in the far distant Paradise, high up above the flood, clear and blissful in the eternal sun? And if all we attain of that whole olive-garden is but one leaf, instead of all its flowers and its fruit, is this leaf of peace, is this dove of peace, to give to us something beyond peace—namely, hope?

Firmian went back to the shooting-ground, his breast full of growing hopes. The heart of man, which, in matters of chance, makes its calculations in direct defiance of the theory of probabilities, and when heads have turned up once, expects them three times running—(although what ought to be anticipated is the very reverse)—or reckons upon hitting the eagle’s talon became it has knocked the sceptre out of it—this heart of man, uncontrollable alike in its fears and in its hopes, the advocate took with him to the shooters’ trench.

He came not by the talons, however. And at the folded praying claws or hands of the general of the Capuchins—these algebraic exponents or heraldic devices of two forequarters of pork—aimed he alike in vain.

It mattered not; more was left of the eagle, when all was done, than would be this day of Poland, if the latter, or its coat of arms—a silver eagle in a bloody field—were to be set up on a throne or a bird-pole, and shot at by a shooting-club composed of an army or two.

Even the imperial globe was not yet knocked down. Number 69, a formidable foregoer, Mr. Everard Rosa von Meyern, had taken his aim—eager to cull this forbidden fruit—a Ribstone pippin and football fit for a very prince, such as this imperial apple, was a thing of too great price to be grasped for the sake of what was to be gained along with it—’twas honour alone that fired his heart—he pulled his trigger, and he might just as well have aimed in the opposite direction. Rosa—this particular apple being too high out of his reach—went, all blushes, in among the lady spectators, dealing out apples of Paris all round, and telling each lady how lovely she was, that she might be convinced how handsome he was himself. In the eyes of a woman, her panegyrist is, firstly, a very clever man, and, ere long, such a nice-LOOKING one. Rosa knew that grains of incense are the anise which these doves fly after, as though infatuated.

Our friend had no need to disquiet himself about any of the would-be fruit-gatherers—about the second, eighth, or ninth, till it came to the eleventh—and he was the Saxon, who shot like the demon in person. There were few among the seventy who didn’t wish this accursed gallows-number at the deuce, or at all events into the vegetable kingdom, where it is altogether absent.[^[50]] The hairdresser fired, struck the eagle on the leg, and the leg remained hanging aloft, with the imperial globe in the talons.

His lodger (and lawyer) came up to the scratch, but the landlord stood still in the trench, to satisfy his soul with curses of his luckless star. As the former levelled the sights of his rifle upon the ball above, he made up his mind that he would not aim at the ball at all, but at the eagle’s tail, so as simply to shake the apple down.

In one second the worm-eaten world-apple fell. The Saxon cursed beyond all description.

Siebenkæs all but offered up an inward prayer, not because a pewter mustard-pot, a sugar-dish, and five florins came showering along with the apple into his lap, but for the piece of good luck—for the warm burst of sunshine which thus came breaking out from among the clouds of the distant storm. “Thou wouldst prove this soul of mine, happy Fortune,” thought he, “and thou placest it, as men do watches, in all positions—perpendicular and horizontal, quiet and unquiet—to see if it will go and mark the time correctly in all, or no. Ay, truly! it shall!”

He let this little, bright, miniature earth-ball roll from one hand to the other, spinning and weaving, as he did so, the following brief chain of syllogisms:—“What a genealogical tree of copies! Nothing but pictures within pictures comedies within comedies! The emperor’s globe is an emblem of this terrestrial globe of ours—the core of each is a handful of earth—and this emperor’s globe of mine, again, is a miniature emblem of a real emperor’s, with even less of earth—none at all, in fact. The mustard-pot and sugar-dish, again, are emblems of this emblem. What a long, diminishing series, ere man arrives at enjoyment!” Most of man’s pleasures are but preparations for pleasure; he thinks he has attained his ends, when he has merely got hold of his means to those ends. The burning sun of bliss is beheld of our feeble eyes but in the seventy mirrors of our seventy years. Each of these mirrors reflects that sun’s image less brightly—more faint and pale—upon the next; and in the seventieth it shimmers upon us all frozen, and is become a moon.

He ran home, but without his globe, for he did not mean to tell her of that till the evening. It was a great refreshment to him to slip, during his shooting vacations, away from the public turmoil to his quiet little chamber, give a rapid narrative of anything of importance going on, and then cast himself back into the mêlée. As his number was a next-door neighbour to Rosa’s, and they had, consequently, their holidays at the same time, it surprises me that he did not come upon Herr von Meyern beneath his own window, inasmuch as that gentleman was walking up and down there, with his head elevated, like an ant. He who desires to destroy a young gentleman of this species, let him look for him under (if not in) a lady’s window; just as an experienced gardener, when he wants to kill woodlice or earwigs, needs only lift up his flower-pots to annihilate them by the score.

Siebenkæs did not hit so much as another shaving the whole of the afternoon; even the very tail, which he had attacked with such success in his bold stroke for the conquest of the globe of the holy Roman empire, resisted all his efforts to knock it off. He let himself be drummed and fifed home by the town militia towards evening. When he got to his wife’s door, he there assumed the rôle of Knecht Ruprecht (the children’s “Bogie,” who, on St. Andrew’s Day, bestows upon them, for the first time in their career, fruit, and fear along with the same), and, growling in a terrible manner, chucked his (wooden) apple in to her; a piece of fun which delighted her immensely. But really I ought not to record such little trifles.

As Firmian laid his head on his pillow, he said to his wife, “This time to-morrow, wife, we shall know if it be two crowned heads that we are going to lay on the pillow, or not! I shall just recall this important minute to your memory to-morrow night, when we’re going to bed!” When he got up in the morning he said, “Very likely this is the last time that I shall rise a common, ordinary person, without a crown.”

He was so anxious to have the mutilated bird (all wet with dew, a mass of gunshot wounds and compound fractures) once more before his bodily eyes, that he hardly knew how to possess himself in patience till the time came. But it was only as long as he did not see the eagle that his hopes of shooting himself into a king at him endured. He was, therefore, delighted to agree to a proposal made by the clever Saxon, whose bullet had throughout the proceedings always cleared the way for his number-neighbour’s; the proposal was, “we go shares in gains and in losses—in the bird and in the cardinal.” This copartnership doubled the advocate’s hopes by the process of halving them.

But these companions in arms didn’t bring down a single painted splinter the whole of the afternoon. Each in his secret heart thought the other was the bird of evil omen; for in matters of chance we are prone to hang our faith upon a bit of superstition, rather than to nothing at all. The fickle Babylonish harlot went fluttering off with that amount of bashful coyness, that the hairdresser once sent a bullet within an ace of the fellow who was working her backwards and forwards.

At last, however, in the afternoon, he sent his Cupid’s dart right through that black heart of hers, and, by consequence, through the pig at the same time. This almost terrified Firmian; he said that if he couldn’t hit anything himself he would accept only the head of this pig—this polypus in the heart of the Babylonian fille de joie. All that was left of the bird was its torso, which stuck to its perch like the very Rump Parliament, which these pretenders to the crown would so fain have dissolved.

A regular running musketry fusilade of eager interest, enthusiasm, emulation, now went flashing from breast to breast, fanned by every puff of powder which rose in smoke as a rifle went off. When the bird shook a little all the competitors shook also, except Herr von Meyern, who had gone off, and—seeing what a state of excitement everybody was in, especially our hero—marched away to Madame Siebenkæs, thinking that he had a better chance of becoming, in that quarter, king of a queen than he had here of acquiring the sovereignty of the riflemen. However, my readers and I shall slip into the Siebenkæs’ chamber after him presently.

Twice already had the seventy numbers loaded in vain for the decisive shot; the obstinate stump still stuck glued to its perch, and scarce so much as trembled; the poor tantalised hearts were torn and pierced by every bullet that sped on its course. Their fears waxed apace, so did their hopes, but most of all their curses (those brief ejaculatory prayers to the devil). The theologians of the seventh decade of the present century had the devil often enough in their pens—in their denials or in their assertions of him—but the Kuhschnappelers had him far oftener in their mouths, particularly the upper classes.

Seneca, in his ‘Remedies for Anger,’ has omitted the simplest of all, the devil. True, the Kabbalists highly extol the therapeutic powers of the word Shemhamphorash, which is a name of a diametrically opposite character; but I have observed, for my part, that the spotted, malignant fever of wrath, so readily diagnosed by the raving delirium of the patient, is instantly relieved, dispersed, and mitigated, by invoking the name of the devil, which is perhaps, indeed, quite as efficacious a remedy as the wearing of amulets. In the absence of this name, the ancients, who were altogether without a Satan, recommended a mere repetition of the A B C, which, it is true, does contain the devil’s name, only too much diluted with other letters. And the word Abracadabra, spoken diminuendo, was a cure for corporeal fevers. As regards the inflammatory fever of anger, however, the greater the quantity of morbid matter which has to be ejected from the system through the secretions of the mouth, the greater is the number of devils necessary to make mention of. For a mere trifling irritation—a mild case of simple anger—“the devil,” or perhaps “hell and the devil,” will generally be found sufficient; but for the pleuritic fever of rage I should be disposed to prescribe “the devil and his infernal grandmother:” strengthening the dose, moreover, with a “donnerwetter” or two, and a few “sacraments,” as the curative powers of the electric fluid are now so generally recognised. It is unnecessary to point out to me that in cases of absolute canine fury or maniacal wrath, doses of the specific, such as the foregoing, are of little avail; I should, of course, let a patient in this condition be “taken and torn by all the devils in hell.” But what I would fain render clear is that, in all these remedies, the real specific is the devil; for as it is his sting which is the cause of our malady, he himself has got to be employed as the remedy, just as the stings of scorpions are cured by the application of scorpions in powder.

The tumult of anticipation shook up the aristocracy and the sixpenny gallery into one common whole. On occasions like this—as also in the chase and in agricultural operations—the aristocracy forget what they are, viz., something better than the citizen classes. An aristocrat should, in my opinion, never for a moment lose sight of the fact that his position with reference to the common herd is that which the actor now a days stands in with respect to the chorus. In the time of Thespis the whole of the tragedy was sung and acted by the chorus, while one single actor, called the protagonist, delivered a speech or two, unaccompanied by any music, bearing on the subject of the play. Æschylus introduced a second actor, the deuteragonist; Sophocles even a third, the tritagonist. In more recent times the actors have been retained, but the chorus omitted, unless we consider those who applaud to represent it. In a similar manner also, in this world of ours (mankind’s natural theatre), the chorus, i. e. the people, has been gradually cleared off the stage, only with more advantage than in the case of smaller theatrical ones, and promoted from taking part in the action of the drama (which the protagonists (princes), deuteragonists (ministers), and tritagonists (people of quality), are better fit to do), to the post of spectators who criticise and applaud—what was the chorus in Athens, now sitting at ease in the pit, near the orchestra, and before the stage where the great “business” is going on.

By this time it was past two o’clock, and the afternoons were brief; yet the saucy bird would not stir. Everybody swore that the carpenter who had hatched it from its native block was a low scoundrel, and must have carved it out of tough branchwood. But at last, all battered, with nearly the whole of its paint broken away from it, it did appear to be somewhat disposed to topple down. The hairdresser, who, like the common herd in general, was conscientious towards individuals only, not towards an aggregation of them, now without any scruple secretly doubled his bullets (since he could not double his rifle), putting in one for himself and one for his brother in arms, in the hope that this decomposing medium might have the effect of precipitating the eagle. “The devil and his infernal grandmother!” cried he, when he had fired his shot, making use of the febrifuge or cooling draught above alluded to. He now had to place all his trust in his lodger, to whom he handed his rifle. Siebenkæs fired, and the Saxon cried, “Ten thousand devils!” doubling in vain the dose of devils, as he had the dose of bullets.

They now, in despair, laid aside their rifles and also their hopes; for there were more pretenders to this crown than there were to that of Rome in the time of Galienus, when there were but thirty. This shooting septuaginta had all telescopes at their eyes (when they had not rifles there), that they might observe how there were a greater number of bullets in this heaven-suspended constellation of theirs than there are stars in the astronomical one of the eagle. The faces of all beholders were now turned towards this Keblah of a bird, like those of the Jews towards their ruined Jerusalem. Even old Sabel sat behind her table of sweetmeats customerless, and gazing up at the eagle. The earlier numbers didn’t even give themselves the trouble of shaking a pinch of powder into their pans.

Firmian pitied these oppressed hearts, swimming heavily in turbid, earthy blood—for whom at this time, the setting sun, the bright array of sky tints, and the broad, fair world were all invisible—or, rather, all shrivelled up to a battered block of wood. The surest token that these hearts were all lying fettered in the eternal dungeon of need and necessity, was that none could make a single witty allusion either to the bird or the kingship. It is only concerning matters which leave our souls free and unshackled that we notice similitudes and connection.

“This bird,” thought Firmian, “is the decoy of all these men, and the money is what baits the lure.” But he himself had three reasons for desiring to be king: firstly, to laugh himself to death at his own coronation; secondly, on account of his Lenette: thirdly, on account of the Saxon.

The second half of the seventy gradually fired off, and the earlier numbers began to load again, if it were for nothing but the fun of the thing. Every one put in two bullets now. Our two Hanseatic confederates came once more up to the mark, and Siebenkæs borrowed a more powerful glass, screwing it on to his rifle like the finder of a telescope.

No. 10 loosened the bird from its joining to the pole. Nothing but the sheer weight of it now retained it on its perch, for they had well nigh saturated and incrusted the wood of it with lead (as certain springs transform wood into iron).

The Saxon had but to graze the eagle-torso—ay, or even the perch of it—nay, the very evening breeze had but to give an extra puff—to send the bird of prey swooping down. He had his rifle to his shoulder—aimed for a whole eternity (there were fifty florins hanging in the sky)—and pulled his trigger. The powder flashed in the pan. The band had all their trumpets ready at their lips—trumpets horizontal, music perpendicular—the boys stood round ready to seize the fallen skeleton; the buffoon in his excitement couldn’t think of a joke to make—his ideas were all up beside the bird; the poor, anxious, eager, excited hairdresser drew his trigger once more, and again ’twas but a flash in the pan. Great drops of perspiration bedewed him; he glowed, he trembled; loaded, aimed, fired, and sent his bullet several ells, at the least, away over the bird.

He stepped back, pale and silent, in a cold perspiration; not an oath did he utter; nay, I suspect he offered up a silent prayer or two that his co-partner might, by heaven’s grace, capture the feathered game.

Firmian went forward, thinking as hard as he could about something else, to keep down his thrilling excitement; aimed, not very long, at this, his anchor in his little storms, as it hung hovering in the twilight, fired; saw the old stump turn three times round in the air, like Fortune’s wheel, and, at last, break loose, and come pitching down.

As, when the old French kings were crowned, a live bird always fluttered in the air; as, at the apotheoses of the Roman emperors, an eagle soared skyward from out the funeral pyre, so did one swoop downward from the heavens at the coronation of my hero.

The children screamed, and the trumpets blared. One moiety of the assemblage crowded to see who the new king was, and to have a look at him; while the other moiety streamed crowding round the jester, as he advanced bearing that shattered bullet-case, the eagle’s body, holding it up above the heads of the throng. The barber ran to meet it, crying, “Vive le roi,” and adding that he was a king himself into the bargain; and Firmian moved towards the door in silence, full of happiness, but fuller of emotion.

And now it is time that we should all of us hurry to the town to see how Rosa fares, what kind of throne he gains chez Madame Siebenkæs (while her husband is thus ascending his)—a richer throne, or only a pillory—and what number of steps he climbs towards whichever of the two it may prove to be.

Rosa knocked at Lenette’s door, and straightway entered in at it, in order that she might not have a chance of coming and ascertaining who was there. “He had torn himself away from the shooting-match; her husband was coming immediately, and he would wait for him there. His rifle had once more been excessively fortunate.” It was with these truths that he came into the presence of the alarmed Lenette, bearing, however upon his countenance, an assumed aristocratic frigid zone. He walked, in an easy and unconcerned manner, up and down the room. He inquired whether this April weather affected her health at all; as for himself, it produced in him a kind of miserable prostrating low fever. Lenette, timid and nervous, stood at the window, her eyes half in the street, half in the room. He glanced, in passing, at her work-table, took up a paper bonnet shape and a pair of scissors, and put them down again, his attention being arrested by a paper of pins. “Why, these are No. 8’s,” he said; “these pins are a great deal too large, Madame; their heads would do for No. 1 shot. The lady whose hat you were putting them in ought really to be immensely grateful to me.”

He then went quickly up to her, and, from a spot a trifling distance below her heart (where she had a whole quiver, or thorn-hedge of needles planted, ready for use), he plucked one out with a dauntless coolness, and held it up for her inspection, saying, “Look how badly this is plated; ’twill spoil every stitch you take with it.” He threw it out of the window, and evinced symptoms of being about to pluck out the remainder from that heart (where the fates had stuck none other than such as were “badly plated”), and stick the contents of his own needle-book into that pretty pincushion instead. But she waved him off with an icy, repellant, gesture, saying, “Don’t trouble yourself.”

“I really wish your husband would come,” he said, looking at his watch. “The king’s shot must be over long ere this time.”

He took up the paper cap-pattern again, and the scissors; but, as she fixed on him a gaze of deep anxiety (lest he should spoil her pattern), he took from his pocket a sheet of verses dipped in hippocrene, and, by way of passing the time, he clipped this up, by wavy lines, into a series of hearts, one within the other. This gentleman, who, like the Augurs, always strove to carry off the heart of the sacrifice—he, whose own heart (like that of a coquette) constantly grew again as often as he lost it (as a lizard’s tail does)—he had the word “heart,” which Germans and men in general seem almost to shrink from uttering, continually on his tongue, or, at all events, impressions of it in his hand.

My belief that his motive for leaving behind him (as he did) his needles, and his rhymeful hearts, was that he had observed of women that they always think fondly of an absent person when they chance to see something of his which he has left behind. Rosa belonged to that class of persons (of both sexes) who never show any cleverness, delicacy of perception, or knowledge of human nature, save in matters relating to love of the opposite sex.

He now catechised out of her a number of cooking and washing receipts of various kinds, and these, despite her cautious monosyllabicity, she imparted—prescription fashion—in all their fulness, both of words and of ingredients. At length he made preparations for departure, saying, he had been most anxious for her husband’s homecoming because of a certain matter of business which he could not well discuss with him on the shooting-ground, among so many people, and before Herr von Blaise. “I shall come another day,” he said; “but the most important point of the affair I can mention to yourself,” and he sat down before her, with his hat and stick in his hand. Just as he commenced his recital, however, observing that she was standing, he laid aside his hat and stick to place a chair for her, opposite to his. His propinquity was grateful to her Schneiderian membrane, at any rate; his odour was paradisaic; his pocket-handkerchief a musk-bag, his head an altar of incense, or magnified civet-ball. (Shaw has remarked that the whole viper tribe has the property of emitting a peculiar, sweet scent.)

“She might readily see,” he said, “that it referred to that wretched lawsuit with the Heimlicher. The poor’s advocate did not deserve, indeed, that a man should interest himself in his favour; but then, you see, he had an admirable wife, who did deserve it.” (He italicised the word “admirable” by means of a hurried squeeze of her hand.) “He had been fortunate enough to induce Herr von Blaise to defer his ‘no’ three separate times, though he had not as yet been able to speak to the advocate in person. But now, that a pasquinade of Mr. Leibgeber’s (whose hand was well known), had come to light near a stove-statue at the Heimlicher’s, nothing approximating to a yielding, or a payment of the trust-fund, was to be dreamt of for a moment. Now this was a state of matters for which his very heart bled, particularly as, since he had been in such poor health of late, he felt only too keen a sympathy and interest in everything; he knew perfectly well what an unhappy condition her (Lenette’s) household matters had been placed in by this lawsuit; and had often sighed, in vain, over many things. He should be delighted, therefore, to advance whatever she might require for current expenditure. As yet she did not know him in the slightest degree, and perhaps could scarce surmise what he did, from motives of the purest benevolence, for six charities in Kuhschnappel—though he could produce documentary evidence if she liked,” and he did produce and hand to her six receipts of the Charitable Commission. I should not be giving proof of that impartiality of character which I bear the reputation of possessing, did I not here freely admit, and clearly place on record, that the Venner had, from his youth up, always shown a certain disposition to benefit and assist the poor of both sexes, and that his consciousness that he dealt in this large-hearted manner, did (when compared with the narrow close-fistedness prevalent in Kuhschnappel) give him some warrant for bearing himself with a certain amount of proper pride towards those mean and miserly beings who sate in judgment upon his little genial breaches of the moral laws. For his conscience bore him witness that, conversely to the process whereby spiders are metamorphosed into jewels, he spun his shining webs (of gold and silver), and in their meshes, wet with the glittering dew of tears, made an occasional capture from time to time.

But for a woman like Lenette (he continued) he would do things of a much grander description; as proofs of which, given already by him, he needed only to point to the fact that he had set at defiance the Heimlicher’s hostility towards her husband, and that he had more than once quietly swallowed speeches of her husband’s own, such as in his social position he had never suffered anybody to address to him before. “Name any sum of money you are in want of; by Heaven, all you have to do is to ask for it.”

Lenette, bashful and trembling, glowed red with shame at this discovery of (what she had believed to be) the mystery of her poverty and her pawnings. With the view of pouring a few drops of oil on the troubled waters, he began, by way of preamble, to make some disparaging remarks concerning his fiancée at Bayreuth. “She reads too much, and doesn’t work enough. I only wish she could have the benefit of a few lessons from you in housekeeping. And really, a lady such as you, with so many attractions (quite unaware of them, too, herself), so much patience, such wonderful diligence and assiduity, should have a very different kind of household than this place for her sphere of action.” Her hand was by this time lying still in the stocks—the close arrest—of his; her wings and her tongue, as well as her hands, were tied and fettered by that fainthearted incapacity of self-assertion which is born of the sense of poverty. When women were in question, Mr. Everard’s longings and likings paid no heed to boundary-marks; but rather strove hard to obliterate them, and get rid of them altogether. Most men, in the wild, unreasoning whirl of their appetites, are like the jay, which tears the carnation to tatters in order to get at its seeds.

Upon her downcast eyes he now riveted a long gaze of fondness, not withdrawing it, however, when she raised them up; and, by dint of keeping his eyes very wide open, and thinking with great vividness on pathetic and touching subjects, he managed to squeeze out about as much water as would have sufficed to make an end of a humming bird of the smaller sort.

In him, as in a fine actor, all false emotions became for the time real and genuine; and when he flattered any one, he at once began to respect him. As soon as he felt there were tears enough in his eyes, and sighs enough in his breast, he asked her if she had any idea what was causing them. She looked innocently, and with kindly alarm, into those eyes of his, and her own began to overflow. This greatly encouraged him, and he said, “It is the fact that you have not such a happy lot as you deserve.”

Ah! selfish pigmy! at such a moment you might have spared this poor, anxious, trembling soul, sinking, well nigh, in an ocean of tears for all the long, long past.

But he knew no sorrow save of the theatrical, the transient, the petty, and the sham sort; and so he spared her not.

Yet that which he had expected would prove the bridge from his heart to hers, namely, sorrow, became, on the contrary, the portcullis barrier between them. A dance, or some joyful tumult of the senses would have brought him further with this commonplace, every-day, honest, and upright woman than three pailfuls of selfish tears. His hopes rose high, as he laid his flowery, sorrow-laden head upon his hands, down into her lap.

But Lenette jumped up with such a suddenness that it nearly knocked him over altogether. She gazed inquiringly into his eyes. Upright women must, I think, have some instinct of their own concerning the lightnings of the eye, by means of which they can distinguish between the lurid flashes of hell and the pure coruscations of heaven. This profligate was as little aware of the flashes of his eyes as was Moses of the brightness of his countenance. Her glance shrunk before his scorching gaze; at the same time I feel it incumbent on me as an historian—seeing that readers by the thousand (and I myself into the bargain) are all up in arms to such an extent against this defenceless Everard—not to conceal the fact that Lenette had had her mind’s eye firmly fixed upon certain rather rude and free-handed sketches which Schulrath Stiefel had drawn for her of the manœuvring grounds of rakes in general (and this one in particular), and, in consequence, had pricked up her ears in alarm at each move he made, whether in advance or in retreat.

And yet every word I write in defence of the poor rascal will only tell against him now; indeed, there are many ladies whose acquaintance with the Salic Law (or Mr. Meiner’s work) teaches them that in former times the penalty for touching a woman’s hand was the same as for hewing off a man’s middle finger, namely, fifteen shillings, and who, being indignant with Rosa for his hand pressures, would fain have him to be duly punished therefor. I am convinced that these ladies would by no means be pacified were I to go on speaking in his extenuation, for they have doubtless learnt, out of Mallet’s ‘Introduction to the History of Denmark,’ that formerly persons who kissed without leave, and against the will, were, by the law of the land, liable to be banished. And there are very many women of the present day who are strictly governed by the ancient pandects of Germany, and, in the case of lip-thieves (since, in the eye of the law, banishment and confinement to one place are held to be tantamount and equivalent one to another), they adjudge them—not, it is true, to be banished from their chambers, but to remain in them; similarly, they lodge debtors (to whom they have given their hearts, and who insist on retaining possession of the same) in the Marshalsea of the Matrimonial Torus.

When Rosa jumped up (as before set forth), he had nothing to urge in extenuation of his false step but an aggravation or augmentation of it, and accordingly he fairly took the marble goddess in his arms—But at this point my progress is barred for a moment by an observation which has to be made ere I proceed; it is this: There are many kindly beauties who cover their retreats or make amends for their denials by concessions. By way of making themselves some amends for their hard services in the campaign of virtue, they offer no resistance at all in matters of the smaller sort, skilfully abandoning a good many intrenchments and outworks (in the shape of words, articles of dress, and so on), to enable them to deftly steal a march upon the enemy and outmanœuvre him—just as clever generals burn the suburbs that they may fight the better up in the citadel.

My sole object in making this observation is to point out that it did not apply to Lenette in any respect whatever. Pure as she was in soul and in body, she might have gone straight away into heaven just as she stood, without changing so much as a stitch of her attire—have taken her eyes, heart, clothes, everything except that tongue of hers, which was uncultivated, rude, indiscreet; so that her resistance to Everard’s attempted burglary on her lips was unnecessarily grave and discourteous (considering what a trifling case of orchard-robbery it really was), much more so than it would have been had Lenette been able to drive the Schulrath’s highly-coloured prognostics concerning Rosa out of her head.

Rosa had anticipated a denial of a less unpleasant kind. His obstinacy availed him nothing as against hers, which was the greater of the two. A gnat-swarm of firm and passionate resolves buzzed about his ears; but when at length (probably inspired thereto by the Schulrath) she said, “Your lordship remembers that the Tenth Commandment says, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife’”—from the crossroad between love and hatred, on which he was standing, he suddenly made a great jump—into his pocket and brought out a wreath of artificial flowers, “There!” he cried, “take them, you nasty, inexorable creature! just this one forget-me-not as a souvenir; devil fly away with me if I want anything further!” If she had taken it, he would immediately have wanted something further; but she turned her face aside and repulsed the silken garland with both hands. At this the honeycomb of love in his heart soured into very vinegar; he grew wild with fury, and throwing the flowers right over the table, he cried, “Why, they are your own pawned flowers—I redeemed them myself—so take them you must.” On which he took his departure, not, however, without making his bow, which Lenette, all hurt and offended as she was, ceremoniously returned.

She took the envenomed wreath to the window, to have a better light to examine it by. Alas! these were indeed, and beyond all doubt, the very roses and rosebuds whose steely thorns were wet with the blood-drops from a pair of pierced hearts. Whilst she, thus weeping and bowed beneath the weight of her woe, stunned and stupid rather than observant, stood at her window, it suddenly struck her as a strange circumstance that the torturer of her soul, though he had gone rattling down the stairs in a hurry with noise enough, had never gone out at the street-door. After a long and attentive watch, during which anxiety, closely bordering upon terror, assumed the rôle of comforter and spake louder than her sorrow (the future, at the same time, driving the past out of view), the becrowned hairdresser came galloping home (the crown of his hat pointing heavenwards), and shouted to her in a mere parenthetical manner as he dashed by, “Madame the queen!” for his great idea was, that before anything else he should rush home, and there on the spot, and without a moment’s delay, make proclamation of the kingship and queenship of four persons.

There now devolves upon me the duty of conducting my readers to the corner where the Venner is cowering. From Lenette he had descended (in two senses of that word) to the hairdresser’s wife, one of that common class of women who never so much as dream of an infidelity all the year round—for no horse in all the kingdom is harder worked—and commit one only when there appears on the scene some tempter, whom they neither invite nor resist, probably forgetting all about the incident by the time next baking day comes round. On the whole, the superiority which the female middle-class is disposed to arrogate to itself over that of a higher rank, is just about equally great as it is questionable. There are not a great many tempters in the middle-class, and those there are are not of a very tempting sort.

Like the earthworm, which has ten hearts that extend all the way from one end of it to the other, Rosa was fitted out with as many hearts as there are species of women; for the delicate, the coarse, the religious, the immoral—every sort, in fact; he was always ready with the appropriate heart. For as Lessing and others so frequently blame the critics for narrowness and onesidedness in matters of taste, inculcating upon them a greater universality of it—a greater power of appreciation of the beautiful, to whatsoever times and nations belonging—so do men of the world also advocate a universality of taste for the live beautiful, on two legs, not excluding any variety of it, but deriving gratification from all. This taste the Venner possessed. There was such a marked distinction between his feelings for the wigmaker’s wife and for Lenette, that, in revenge upon the latter, he came to the determination, on the stair, to take a jump right over this distinction and slip in to pay a visit to the landlady, while her narrow-chested husband was away scheming and plotting in confederacy for a crown in another quarter. Sophia (this was her name) had been always combing at wigs in the bookbinder’s on the occasions when the Venner had been sitting there on the business of getting his novels and life romances done up and bound, and there they had communicated to one other, by looks and glances, all that which people are not in the habit of confiding to third parties. Meyern made his entrée into the childless abode with all the confident assurance of an epic poet, who soars superior to all prefaces. There was a certain corner partitioned off from the room by boards: it contained little or nothing—no window, no chair, a little warmth from the sitting-room, a clothes-cupboard, and the couple’s bed.

When the first compliments had been exchanged, Rosa took up a position behind the door of this partitioned space, for the street passed close by the window, and at this late hour he was anxious not to give occasion to unpleasant surmises on the part of passers by. Of a sudden, however, Sophia saw her husband run by the window. The intent to commit a sin may betray itself by a superabundance of carefulness and caution; Rosa and Sophia were so startled at the sight of the runner, that she begged the young gentleman to get behind the partition until her husband should go back to the shooting-range. The Venner went stumbling into the sanctum sanctorum, while Sophia placed herself at the door of it, and, as her husband entered, made as though she were just coming out of it, closing the door after her. The moment he had stuttered out the news of his elevation in rank, he darted out of the room, crying, “She upstairs there knows nothing about it yet.” Gladness and hurried draughts of liquor had just blurred the sharp outlines of his lighter ideas with a thin haze or fog. He ran out and called “Madame Siebenkæs” up the stairs (he was anxious to be off again so as to join the procession). She hastened half way down, heard the glad news with trembling, and, either by way of masking her joy, or as a fruit of a warmer liking for her husband now that fortune seemed kinder to him (or it may have been, perhaps, another fruit which joy commonly bears, namely, anxiety, or shall I name it fear?), she threw down to him the question, “Is Mr. von Meyern out yet?”

“What! was he in my room just now?” cried he, while his wife echoed, unbidden, from the door, “Has he been in the house?” “He was here, upstairs,” Lenette replied, with a touch of suspicion, “and he hasn’t gone out yet.”

The hairdresser’s suspicions were now awakened, for the consumptive trust no woman, and, like children, take every chimney-sweep they see for the devil himself, hoof, horns, tail and all. “Things are not all exactly as they should be here, Sophy,” said he to his wife. The passing brain-dropsy, induced by what he had drunk during the day and by his half-share in a throne and fifty florins, had the effect of screwing his courage up to such a pitch that he secretly formed the idea of treating the Venner to a good sound cudgelling in the event of his coming upon him in any illegal corner. Accordingly he started upon voyages of discovery, first exploring the entrance passage, where Rosa’s sweet-scented head served him as a trail, or lure; he followed this incense-pillar of cloud into his own room, observing that this Ariadne’s thread of his, this sweet odour, grew stronger as he went. Here among the flowers lay the serpent—as, according to Pliny, sweet-smelling forests harbour venomous snakes. Sophia wished herself in the nethermost of Dante’s hells, though in fact and reality she was there already. It dawned upon the hairdresser that if the Venner would only stay where he was, in the closed titmouse-trap of the partitioned corner, he should have bruin safe in his toils; consequently he reserved till the last a peep into the said corner. What is historically certain is, that he seized upon a pair of curling-tongs wherewith to probe the dark corner and gauge the cubic contents thereof. Into its dark depths he made a horizontal lunge with his tongs, but encountered nothing. He next inserted this probe, this searcher of his, into more places than one—firstly, into the bed, next, under the bed (taking this time the precaution to keep opening and shutting the tongs, which were not hot, on the chance of some stray lock of hair getting caught in them in the darkness.) However, all this trap captured was air. At this juncture he came upon a clothes-cupboard, the door of which had always stood gaping ajar for the last six years or so; the key had been lost just that time, and in this slipshod household it was a matter of necessity to keep this door open, otherwise the lock would have snapped to, and there would have been no getting in. To-day, however, this door was close shut. The Venner (in a profuse perspiration) was inside; the friseur pressed the lock home, and then the net was fairly over the quail.

The hairdresser, now master of the situation, quietly took the command of his establishment at his ease; the Venner could not get out!

He despatched Sophia (as red as a furnace and loudly dissentient, though forced to obey) for the locksmith and his breaching implements; however, she quite made up her mind to come back with a lie, not with a locksmith. When she had marched off he fetched Fecht, the cobbler, up, to be at once his witness of and his assistant in that which he proposed to accomplish. The shoe-stitcher crept into the room softly at his heels; the phthisic haircurler went up to the canary-cage and addressed the bird imprisoned therein (tapping the while with his tongs on the gate of this fortress of Engelsburg) as follows: “I know you are in there, honourable Sir, make a move; there’s nobody here but me, as yet (there’ll soon be more). I can break the cupboard open with my tongs and let you out.” Laying his ear close to the door of this Spandau, he heard the captive sigh.

“Ah! you are puffing and panting a little, honourable gentleman,” said the wigmaker; “I am here at the door by myself now. When the locksmith comes and breaks it open, we shall all see you, and I’ll call the whole house; but all I shall ask to let you jump out now, quietly, and be off unseen, will be a mere trifle. Give me that hat of yours, and a shilling or two, and give me your custom.”

At length the miserable prisoner knocked upon the door and said, “I am in here; just let me out, will you, my man, and I’ll do all you say. I can help, from the inside, to break open the door.” The wigmaker and the cobbler applied their battering apparatus to the “parloir” of this donjon-keep, and the captive bounded forth. During the breaking open of the gates of jubilee the friseur parleyed or negotiated a little more, and amerced the anchorite in the locksmith’s fee; at last, bringing Rosa forth, like Pallas in her mail, when she issued from Jove’s cranium into the light of day, “The landlord,” said Fecht, “couldn’t have managed the job without me.”

Rosa opened his eyes wide at the sight of this auxiliary deliverer from the house of bondage, took off the sweet-smelling hat (which the cobbler immediately clapped on to his own head), shed some drops of golden rain from his waistcoat-pocket upon the pair, and, in dread of them and of the locksmith’s arrival, fled home bareheaded in the dark. The friseur, whose bald pate was so near to the triple crown of the emperors of old, and the popes of the present (for the eagle gave him a crown, the Venner a hat, and his wife had nearly placed something else——),—however, the friseur, in high satisfaction of this new martyr-crown of felt, which he had been envying the Venner the possession of all the afternoon, went back with it to the shooting-ground, that he might have the gratification of marching home in company with his co-emperor, attended by their subjects and their vassals.

The wigmaker took his hat off to his royal brother Siebenkæs (that hat so much more worthy of a co-king than his former one), and told him something of what had been happening.

The Heimlicher von Blaise smiled his Domitian smile to-day more affectionately than ever, which made the bird emperor far from comfortable; for friendliness and smiling make the heart colder when it is cold to begin with, and warmer when it is warm—just as spiritus nitri does water. From a friendliness of this particular kind nothing was to be expected but its opposite, as in ancient jurisprudence excessive piety in a woman was merely a proof that she had sold herself to the devil. Christ’s implements of torture became holy relics; and, conversely, relics of saints often become implements of torture.

Under the twinkling gleams of the wide, starry firmament (where new constellations kept bursting into view, in the shape of banging rockets) the grand procession marched along. The competitors who had come after the king’s shot had fired their rifles in the air, by way of salute to the royal pair. The two kings walked side by side, but the one who belonged to the guild of wigmakers found some difficulty in standing (what between joy and beer), and would gladly have sat down upon a throne. However, over these seventy Brethren of the Eagle, and the two vicars of the empire, we are losing sight, and delaying to treat of something else.

To wit, the town militia, who are also present, or more properly speaking, the Royal Kuhschnappel Militia. Concerning this regiment I think a good deal, and say only about half what I think. A city or county militia regiment—and particularly the Royal Kuhschnappel Militia—is a distinguished and important body of men, whose raison d’être is to scorn and show contempt for the enemy, by always turning their backs upon him—showing him, in fact, nothing but backs, like a well-ordered library. If the enemy has anything in the nature of courage, then our said force sacrifices to Fear like the ancient Spartans; and as poets and actors ought in the first place to experience and picture to themselves in a vivid manner the emotions they are about to portray, the militia endeavours to give an illustration, in itself, of that panic terror into which it would fain throw the enemy. Now with the view of affording these men of war (or “of peace” if you prefer it) the necessary amount of practice in the mimic representation of terror, they are daily put through a process of being terrified at the city gates. It is called “being relieved.” When one of these men of peace is on sentry, another of them, a comrade of his, marches up to his sentry box, shouts out words of command at him in a warlike tone of voice, and makes hostile and threatening gestures in close proximity to his nose; the one who is on sentry also cries out in a similar voice, goes through certain motions with his weapon, and then lays it down and gets away as fast as he can; the conqueror in this brief winter campaign retains possession of the field, and puts on the watchcoat which he has taken from the other man by way of booty; but that they may each have an opportunity of being terrified by the others, they take the part of conqueror turn about. A warrior of this peaceful order may very often be most dangerous in actual war, when, in the act of bolting, he happens, in throwing his rifle away with the bayonet fixed, to throw it too far, and harpoon his too proximate pursuer with it. Militiamen of this sort (“precious” they are in every sense) are usually posted, for greater security’s sake, in public places where they are safe from injury, such as the gates of towns, where these harpooners are protected by the town and gate; at the same time I have often wished, in passing, that these students of the art military were provided with a good thick stick, so that they might have something to defend themselves with if anybody should try to take away their muskets.

It will appear to many that I am but artfully cloaking the shortcomings of the militia in these respects; I am prepared for this—but it is not difficult to perceive that this species of praise also applies to all small standing armies of lesser principalities—forces which are recruited only that they may recruit. I shall here utter myself on this subject a little. Vuillaume recommends educators to teach children to play at soldiers, to make them drill and mount guard, in order to accustom them, by this play, to firm and active habits both of body and of mind; in short, to render them firm and upright. This soldier-game has been carried on for a considerable time already in Campe’s Institute. But is Mr. Vuillaume really ignorant that scholar-drill, such as he recommends, has been long since introduced by every good prince of the empire into his dominions? Does he suppose it is anything new when I tell him that these princes seize upon all strong young fellows (as soon as they attain the canonical height) and have them drilled, in order that they, the State’s children, may thus be taught mores, carriage, and all that has to be acquired in the State’s school? The truth is that, even in the very smallest principalities, the soldiers often possess all the acquirements and accomplishments of real soldiers; they can present arms, stand bolt upright at portals, and smoke at all events, if not fire—matters which a poodle learns with ease, but a country bumpkin with more difficulty.

To these rehearsals of warlike business I attribute it that many otherwise clever and sensible men have allowed themselves to believe that this sham soldiery of the little States, is in fact a real soldiery; they must otherwise have seen in a moment that with so small a force neither could a small territory be defended, nor a large one attacked; neither is there indeed any need for even this small force, since in Germany the question of relative strength is merged in that of equality of religion. Hunger, cold, nakedness, and privation are the benefits which Vuillaume considers the soldier-game to hold out to his scholars, as lessons in patient endurance and fortitude; now these are the very advantages which the State schools above referred to confer upon the young men of the country—and that much more thoroughly and efficaciously than Vuillaume does—which, of course, is the entire object of the institution. I am quite aware that there are not infrequent cases in which perhaps a third part of the population escapes being made into soldiery, and consequently gets none of the valuable practice in question; at the same time there can be no doubt that if we even get the length of having two-thirds of the population with rifles on their shoulders in the place of scythes, the remaining third (inasmuch as it has considerably less to mow, to thresh, and to subsist upon) obtains the before-mentioned benefits (of cold, hunger, nakedness, &c.), almost gratis, and without having to fire so much as a single shot. Let but barracks be multiplied in a sufficient ratio in a country, in a province, parish, town, village (as the case may be), and the remainder of the houses will of themselves settle down, into suburbs, and accessory and out-buildings to the barracks, nay, become absolute conventual establishments, in which the three monastic vows (the Prince alone being père provincial) are, whether taken or not, at all events most religiously kept.

We now hear the two vicars of the empire go into their homes. The friseur’s sole punishment to his wife is a narrative of the whole affair, and a sight of the hat; while the advocate rewards Lenette with the kiss which she had refused to other lips. If her story did not please him, the teller of it did, and on the whole the only thing she omitted was the flower-wreath, and the allusions made to it. She would not cloud the happiness of his evening, nor bring back upon him the pain and the reproaches of that other evening when she had pawned it. I, like many of my readers, had expected that Lenette would have received the news of the enthronisation far too coldly; she has deceived us all; she received it even too joyfully. But there were two good reasons for this; she had heard of it an hour before, and consequently the first feminine mourning over a joy had had time to give place to the joy itself. For women are like thermometers, which on a sudden application of heat sink at first a few degrees, as a preliminary to rising a good many. The second reason for her being thus indulgent and sympathetic was the humiliating consciousness she possessed of the Venner’s visit, and of the wreath in its hiding-place; for we are often severe when we are strong, and practise forbearance when we stand in need of it.

I now wish the entire royal family and household a good night, and a pleasant awaking in the eighth chapter.

CHAPTER VIII.

SCRUPLES AS TO PAYMENT OF DEBTS—THE RICH PAUPER’S SUNDAY THRONE-CEREMONIAL—ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS ON THE GRAVE—NEW THISTLE SEEDLINGS OF CONTENTION.

Siebenkæs, a king, and yet a poor’s-advocate and member of a wood-economising association, arose next morning a man who could lay forty good florins down upon his table at any hour of the day. The whole of that forenoon he enjoyed a pleasure which possesses, for the virtuous and right-thinking, an especial charm—that of paying debts: firstly, to the Saxon his house-rent, and then to the butchers, bakers, and other nurses of this needy machine, our body, their little duodecimo accounts. For he was like the aristocracy who borrow from the lower classes, not money, but only victuals, just as there are many judges who are bribeable with the latter, but not with the former.

That he does pay his debts is not a circumstance which should lower him in the opinion of anybody who remembers that he is a man of very poor “extraction”—scarcely of any “extraction” at all, in fact. A man of rank is expected (as a thing becoming his position) not to pay his debts, for thanks to the papal indulgences granted to his noble ancestors at the time of the Crusades, he need give his mind no trouble on the subject of liability, and least of all should liabilities of a pecuniary nature cause him a thought. To place a man of a high and delicate sense of honour, a courtier say, under an obligation (e.g. to lend him money) is to wound his feelings to a greater or less extent; and a wound of this sort to the feelings is a matter which his refined sensitive nature naturally leads him to endeavour to forgive; he will, therefore, do his utmost to drive the injury thus done him, with all its attendant circumstances, completely out of his mind. Should the person who inflicted this hurt upon his sense of honour remind him of it, he will then, with genuine delicacy of feeling, make as if he were scarcely aware that he had been wounded. Rough young squires, again, and officers on the march do really pay, and moreover, they coin (if the expression may be used) for themselves the money they require, as is the case in Algiers, where every one possesses the privilege of minting. In Malta there is current a leathern coin of the value of eightpence, on which is the legend “Non As, sed Fides.” With leather money of a somewhat different description, not circular in shape, but drawn out to some length, more like that of the ancient Spartans (and, indeed, this sort of money usually gets the appellation of dog-whips or riding-whips), the landed gentry and people of village nobility pay their coachmen, Jews, carpenters, and others to whom they owe money—going on paying them, in fact, until they are quite satisfied. Indeed I once stood at table and saw officers, men most tenacious of their honour, take their swords from the wall or from their sides, and therewith, when the boots asked for his money, pay him in the true currency of antiquity (among the brave Spartans, also, weapons were money), so that, in fact, the fellow’s jacket got a better brushing than most of the boots for cleaning which he wanted to be paid. And looking at the matter all round, ought it really to be accounted a grave offence in military personages, even of the highest rank, to pay their small debts? So that often, when some wretched tailor asks for metal, they take the iron ell-measure from him, and (while, moreover, applying to him in person the very measure which he applied to their furs) press—not perhaps into his hands, but on to a part of his body on which “contour” lines might be drawn—not mere coins, or bills on approved security, but a metal which Peru with all its wealth does not boast the possession of, the aforesaid iron to wit? In Sumatra the skulls of the enemy are their Louis d’ors and head-pieces, and even this species of currency—the hostile head of the tradesman who has furnished goods—is often taken by the nobler creditor, just by way of satisfying him “in full of all demands.” Neither in the Clausular Jurisprudence nor in the most recent Prussian code is it enacted that a creditor is to stipulate in his bill which species of currency he elects to be paid in by his noble debtor, the metallic currency or the castigatory.

On this Thursday morning Siebenkæs had a tough and ticklish argument, or piece of special pleading, to go through on the subject of the half-heart or (half-pig) of the cardinal protector, which his co-king, the hairdresser, pressed the acceptance of upon him, by way of making more sure of duly sharing all the prizes which appertained to the king’s shot himself. But his having gained the twenty-five florin prize did not add to the warmth of his arguments, and at last he agreed to the arrangement that the animal should be eaten, pure and clean, like a passover lamb, next Sunday in Siebenkæs’s room by the lodgers generally, and by the two rifle kings with their queens in company with Schulrath Stiefel. The flower goddess of the days of man took at this juncture a fingertipful or two of seeds of quickly blooming and quickly fading flowers (such as like the hellebore come into blossom in our December) and sowed them beside the path which Firmian’s steps most often trod. Ah, happy man, how soon will these forced blossoms fall from your days. Will not your philosophic Diana-and-bread-fruit tree (which takes the place, in your case, of an oak of lamentation) fare like the cut plants which people put in lime-water in their chambers on St. Andrew’s Day, and which, after a hurried outburst of yellowish leaves and feeble dingy flowers, fade and perish for good and all?

Sleep, riches, and health, to be truly enjoyed, must be interrupted; it is only during the first few days after the burden of poverty or sickness has been lifted from a man’s shoulders, that the upright posture, and the free breath, cause their fullest measure of delight. These days lasted for our Firmian until the Sunday. He built a whole cubic-foot of his Devil rampart (in his ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers’), he wrote reviews, he wrote law papers, he kept a careful eye on the maintenance of the household truce (liable to be disturbed by the question of the redemption of the pawned furniture). I shall treat of this matter firstly, before proceeding to give an account of the Platonic banquet of the Sunday. On Firmian’s coronation-day he invested twenty-one florins in a watch, with the view of avoiding frittering away his money by driblets; he thought it well to cast an anchor of hope into his watch-pocket. Then, when his wife talked of redeeming the salad-bowl, the herring-dish, and other pledges a matter involving not kisses only but half of his capital—he would say, “I’m not in favour of it, old Sabel would very soon have to carry them off again; however, if you’re determined, pray have them out, I shall not interfere.” If he had offered any opposition, back they would have had to come; but, inasmuch as he poured the greater portion of his cash into her money bag, and as she marked its daily ebb—and as she could go and redeem the furniture any day—why for that very reason she let it alone. Women are fond of putting off, men of pushing on; with the former, patience most speedily gains us our point; with the latter (ministers of the crown for instance) impatience. I here once more remind all German husbands, who have any pledge they do not wish to redeem, how to deal with their fair registers.

Every morning she said, “Ah! we really must send and get back our plates,” to which he as regularly antiphonated, “I don’t think so; I praise you rather for not doing it.” And in this manner he caused his own desire to assume the form of another person’s desert. Firmian understood some individual specimens of humanity, but not humanity as a class, in its broad sense; he was embarrassed with every woman at first, while her acquaintance was new, though not so afterwards when he came to know her better; he knew exactly how one ought to talk, walk, and stand, in “society,” but he never put this knowledge in practice; he took accurate note of all outward and inward awkwardness of other people, but yet retained all his own; and after treating his acquaintances for years with the airs of a superior, experienced man of the world accustomed to “society,” he would suddenly find, on some occasion of his being from home, that, unlike a true man of the world, he had no effect or influence whatever on people to whom he was a stranger; to make a long tale short, he was a man of letters.

Meanwhile, however, before the Sunday came, notwithstanding all the peace-sermons and peace-treaties in his heart, he found that he had plumped, before he knew where he was, right into the thick of a household battle of the frogs and mice once more, which occurred as follows:—It is matter of history, derived from his own statement, that, as Lenette kept on ceaselessly washing her hands and arms, as well as other things by the hundred (although, for the most part, with cold water, it being impossible to have warm water continually ready)—that, I say, he simply asked, in the gentlest tone in the world, the kindly and half-playful question, “Doesn’t that cold water give you cold?” She answered “No,” in a sostenuto voice. “Perhaps warm water would be more likely to do so, would it?” he continued. Her answer was, “Yes, it would,” delivered in a snapping staccato. Moralists and psychologists, who may be a good deal surprised at this half-angry answer to a question so innocent, are, contrary to my expectations, far behindhand in their knowledge of psychology in general, and the psychology of this tale in particular. Lenette knew by experience that the advocate, like Socrates, generally opened his battles in the most dulcet tones, as the Spartans commenced theirs to the sound of flutes, and, in fact, continued them in the same strain, that, like the said Spartans, he might retain complete command of himself. She therefore dreaded that, on this occasion also, his flute-text might usher in a declaration of war against the feminine form of government, of which the various provinces of work are divided one from another by washing-waters, as the judicial districts of modern Bavaria are by rivers.

“What key is a husband to play his tune in, I ask you all!” the advocate would often cry with curses, “since, whether he takes it in the major or in the minor, or plays piano or forte, it seems all the same in the end?”

On the present occasion, however, all he was aiming at, his gentleness of demeanour notwithstanding, was a preface to a proper system of educating or training the bodies of children. For after her answer he went on to say, “I am delighted to hear you say so. If we had children, I see you would be continually washing them, and with cold water, too, over their whole bodies, and this would invigorate them and make them strong and hardy, since, as you say, it produces warmth.” Her only answer to this was to hold her hands aloft, folded for victory, like the biblical prophet—for, in her eyes, a cold bathing of children was a Herodian blood-bath. Firmian then developed with much greater clearness his invigorating system of upbringing, while more and more strenuously strove his wife against it, with all her feathers ruffled, till by dint of able exposition on both sides of the respective masculine and feminine systems of rearing, they had nearly reached a point where they would have clashed together, like a couple of summer thunderclouds, had not he dispelled these by firing the following shot: “Good heavens! have we any children? Why should we make fools of ourselves in this way about the matter?”

“I was speaking of other people’s children,” was Lenette’s reply.

Consequently, as I said above, war did not break out, but, on the other hand, the morning of the Sabbath of peace brake in, and with it came the guests who were bent upon possessing themselves of (and eating) the warm and divided heart, or pig, of the Babylonish harlot, or Cardinal Protector. It seemed, in fact, as if some happy star of the wise men of the East must be standing in the heavens above this houseful of recipients of out-door relief, for there had, by good luck, been a gale of wind on the previous Friday which had blown down some half of the Government forest and strewn the path to Advent, for the poor, so grandly with branches (and the trees attached) that the entire staff of forest officials could not hinder the ingathering of such a vintage. For many a long year the Morbitzer’s house hadn’t boasted anything approaching to such a stock of timber, part of it purchased, part adroitly collected.

And if every Sunday is—in a poor man’s quarters—in itself and in the nature of things, not only a sun-day, but a moon-and-stars-day into the bargain a day when a poor fellow has his mouthful or two of food, his trifle or two of good clothes, his twelve hours for eating and twelve for lying down, besides the necessary neighbours to talk with—it may be conjectured in what a superlative sort this particular Sunday dawned upon the Morbitzer household, where everybody was as sure of eating his share of the pig in the afternoon as of hearing the sermon in the morning, and with as little to pay for the one as for the other, seeing that it was a settled matter that the lodger of greatest dignity in the establishment had determined that his coronation feast should be celebrated nowhere but there, at the table with mere working men.

Old Sabel was on the spot before the earliest church-bell had begun to toll. The rifle-king’s crown-treasury could afford to appoint her hereditary mistress of the kitchen, under Lenette, for a kreuzer or two and a plate or so of victuals; but the queen looked upon her as a superfluity and coadjutor, or auxiliary queen. A king on the chessboard gets two queens whenever a mere ordinary pawn gets moved on to the place of royalty, one of the royal squares (though he has not lost his first consort); and indeed it is just the same when it happens under the canopy of a throne. Lenette, however, would have preferred to have washed, cooked, and served the meats with her own unassisted hands, like a true Homeric or Carlovingian princess. The marksman-monarch himself fled the noisy, dusty throne-scaffold of the day, and in a loose old coat, happy and free, he rambled about the broad green levels of the quiet, blue, latter autumn, checked by no interfering dry stems or straw sheaves standing sentry on the plain, and bursting no thicker barrier-chains than the webs of the spiders. Never do husbands more happily and tranquilly take their walks abroad—out in the open country, or, indeed, up and down in other people’s rooms—than when, in their own, the stamping-mills, the sugar and fanning-mills are at work, whirling and roaring, and they promise themselves, at their home-coming, the clean, finished product and outcome of all these mill-wheels. Siebenkæs glanced with a poet’s idyllic eye from his quiet meadow into the distant noise-chamber, full of pans, choppers, and besoms, and found true and deep delight in a peaceful contemplation of the whirl of backwards and forwards assiduity going on there, and in picturing to himself and joining in, the pleasant tongue-visions of the hungry guests, till suddenly he grew red and hot. “You’re doing a fine thing!” he said, addressing himself; “I could do that, myself, too! But there’s the poor wife scrubbing and cooking herself to death at home, and nobody giving her even a thought of thanks.” And the least he could do was to vow, on the spot, that however he might find things moved about and “put in order” in the house on his return, he would accept and belaud it all without a word of demur.

And history vouches, to his honour, for the fact that when, on his reaching the house, he found his bookshelves dusted and his inkpot washed white on the outside, and all his belongings “put in order”—(in a different order to the previous one, be it observed),—he at once praised Lenette in the kindest manner, without a shade of irritation, and said she had performed her household processes and accomplished her cleaning and brushing in a manner quite after his heart, for that it was impossible to be too exquisitely neat and spick and span in the eyes of commonplace women, particularly such as composed the infernal triumvirate who were to be present that day (i. e. the bookbinder’s, the barber’s, and the shoemaker’s wives); and on that account he had left the intendance-general of the theatre of operations entirely to her—whereas, in the case of scholars, like Stiefel and himself, the room might be turned into a complete English scouring, carding, and brushing apparatus—for men of their sort never glanced down at trifles of that description from their sublime heights of mental contemplation.

But how pleasantly and cheerily did the president of the eating congress put all things in train by this his kindly temper, even before the assembling of the congress; though this appeared most fully after it had assembled. When the thirteen United States, by their thirteen deputies, dine together at a round table to celebrate some arrangement which they have jointly arrived at (and that they do so at least, establishes the fact that when thirteen dine at a table the thirteenth does not necessarily die), it is an easy matter for the thirteen free states in question, paying, as they do, the expenses out of thirteen treasuries, to treat their delegates as liberally as Firmian treated his guests. It is pleasant to look at cattle grazing in the meadows, but not so pleasant to see Nebuchadnezzar conducting himself like one of them; and similarly it is repulsive to see a man of cultivation pasturing with a too eager delight on the stomach’s meadow, the dinner-table (though it is not so in the case of the poor). Firmian’s guests were all of one mind, even the married couples; for it is a leading characteristic of the lower classes that they enter into a dozen treaties of peace and make as many declarations of war, in the course of the four-and-twenty hours, and particularly that they ennoble each of their meals into a feast of love and reconciliation. Firmian saw in the lower classes a kind of standing troupe of actors playing Shakespeare’s comedies, and thousands of times fancied that the dramatist himself was prompting them unseen. He had long coveted the pleasure of having some enjoyment or other of which he could give away some portion to the poor; he envied those rich Britons who pay the score of a beershop full of labourers, or, like Cæsar, give free commons to an entire town. The poor who have houses give to the poor who have not—one lazzarone gives to another—as shell-fish become the habitations of other crustaceans, and earthworms are the habitable universes of lesser worms.

In the evening arrived Peltzstiefel, who was too learned a man to eat swine’s flesh, or a measure of salt, among the untaught vulgar. And then Siebenkæs could once more entertain an idea unintelligible to any one but Stiefel. He could lay the sceptre and the tinted glass-ball of the imperial globe upon the table, and in his capacity of king of the feast and of the eagle, say that his long hair served him for a crown, like that of the old Frank kings, his own crown having been knocked down by his landlord’s rifle; he could assert that the rule by which only he by whose hands the eagle was brought down became king was clearly imitated from the code of the Fraticelli Berghadi, who could only elect to the papacy a person who had killed a child. That ’twas true he had it not in his power to reign over Kuhschnappel so long by fourteen days as the King of Prussia over the ecclesiastical see of Elten (the latter period being one of fifteen days)—that ’twas true he had a crown and revenues, but the latter were sadly reduced, cut down by one-half, in fact—and that he was far too much like the Great Mogul, who formerly had an income of two hundred and twenty-six millions a year, but now receives only the one hundred and thirteenth part of that sum; however, at his (Siebenkæs’s) coronation, though there had been no general liberation of the wicked prisoners, yet one good one had been released, namely, himself; also that, like Peter the Second of Arragon, he had been crowned with nothing worse than bread: finally that, under his ephemeral rule, nobody was beheaded, robbed, or beaten to death; and—which delighted him most of all—the feeling that he was like one of the ancient German princes, who governed, defended, and increased a free people, and was a member of that free people himself, &c. &c.

The throats in this royal chamber grew louder and drier as the evening advanced; the pipes (those chimneys of the mouth) made of the room a heaven of clouds, and of their heads heavens of joy. Outside, the autumn sun brooded, with warm, flaming wings, over the cold, naked earth, as if in haste to hatch the spring. The guests had drawn the quint, (I mean the five prizes of the five senses) out of the ninety numbers, or ninety years of the lottery of human life; the famished eyes were sparkling, and in Firmian’s soul the buds of gladness had burst their leaflet envelopes and swelled forth into flower. Deep happiness always leads love by the hand; and Firmian longed to-day, with an unutterable longing, to press his heart, all heavy with bliss, upon Lenette’s breast, and there forget all his wants and hers.

These circumstances, in their combination, inspired him with a strange idea. He determined, on this happy day, to go and redeem the pawned silken flower-wreath and plant it in some dark spot out of doors, then take her out there in the evening, or perhaps even in the night, and give her a pleasant little surprise at the sight of it. He slipped out and took his way to the pawnbroker’s; but—as all our resolves begin in us as tiny sparks, and end in broad lightning flashes—so, as he went, he improved his original idea (of redeeming the wreath from pawn) into an altogether different one, that of buying real flowers and planting them by way of goal of the nocturnal ramble. There was no difficulty in getting red and white roses from the greenhouse of a gardener of the Prince of Oettingen-Spielberg, who had lately come to the place. He walked round under the upright glass roofs, all behung with blossom, went to the gardener and got what he wanted—only no forget-me-nots, for these, of course, the man had left the meadows to supply. But forget-me-nots were indispensable, to make the loving surprise complete. He therefore took his real autumn flowers to the pawnbroker woman’s, in whose hands his silk plants had been deposited, that he might twine the dead, poor, cocoon forget-me-nots among the living roses. What was his astonishment to learn that the pledge had been redeemed and taken away by Mr. von Meyern, and that he had paid a sum of money so considerable that the woman thought she still owed the advocate a debt of thanks. It needed all the strength of a heart fortified by love to keep him from going at once to the Venner with a storm of reproaches for this move of warlike strategy—this pledge-robbery—for he could scarce endure the thought (a mistaken idea, ’tis true, only given rise to by Lenette’s silence on the subject of the garland) of his pure love’s pretty token in Rosa’s beringed and thievish fingers. The brokeress, too, though she was not to blame, would have been severely taken to task had it been any other day, one less full of love and happiness; as it was, however, Firmian cursed in a merely general manner, especially as the woman gave him silk forget-me-nots of somebody else’s, when he said he wanted some. When in the street again, he was at variance with himself as to the spot where he should plant his flowers; he wished he knew where to find some fresh-dug bed of fine old mould, of which the dark colour should set off to advantage the red and blue of the flowers. At length he saw a field which is broken into beds at all seasons—in summer and in winter, ay, in the bitterest cold—the churchyard, with its church, hanging like a vineyard on the slope of a hill beyond the town. He slipped in by a back entrance and saw the fresh-raised boundary-hillock which marked the close of an earthly life, rolled, as it were, up to the foot of the triumphal gate, through which a mother, with her newborn child in her arms, had passed away into the brighter world. Upon this earthen bier he laid his flowers down, like a funeral garland, and then went home.

The members of the gladsome company had scarcely missed him; they were floating, like fish benumbed in their element saturated with foreign matter, paralysed with the poison of pleasure; but Stiefel was still in his senses, and was talking with Lenette. The world has already learned from the former portion of this history—the people of the house, too, were well aware—that Firmian was fond of running away from his guests, in order to throw himself back into their society with a greater zest, and that he interrupted his pleasures in order that he might savour them—as Montaigne used to have himself awakened from his sleep that he might thoroughly appreciate what it was—and so Firmian merely said that he had been out.

All the waves, even the most turbulent of them, subsided at last, and there was nothing left in the ebb save those three pearl mussels, our three friends. Firmian gazed with tender eyes upon Lenette’s bright ones, for he loved her the more fondly because he had a pleasure in store for her. Stiefel glowed with a love so pure that, without any serious error of logic, he was able to define and classify it to himself as a mere sympathetic rejoicing in her happiness; particularly as his love for the wife placed wings, not fetters, upon his affection for her husband. Indeed the Schulrath’s anxiety was directed altogether to the reverse side of the question, his only doubt being whether he had it in him to express his love with adequate force and ardour. Therefore he pressed both their hands many times, and laid them between his own; he said beauty was a thing to which he very rarely paid any attention, but that he had been observant of it that day, because that of Mrs. Siebenkæs had appeared to such great advantage amid all her labours, particularly with all these ordinary women about her, and at them he had not so much as looked. He assured the advocate that he had considered his goodness and kindness to this admirable wife of his as a mark of increased personal friendship for himself; and he asseverated to her that his affection for her, of which he had given some little proof as they came together from Augspurg in the coach, would grow stronger the more she loved his friend, and through that friend, himself.

Into this cup of joy of hers Firmian of course cast no drop of poison relative to (what he supposed to be) the news of the Venner’s having made prize of the flowers. He was so happy that day; his little toy crown had so tenderly covered and soothed all the bleeding wounds on that head of his whence he had lifted his crown of thorns just a little way (as Alexander’s diadem soothed the bleeding head of Lysimachus), that his only wish was that the night might be as long as a Polar one, since it was just as calm and peaceful, as bright and serene. In moments like these the poison fangs of all our troubles are broken out, and a Paul, like him in Malta of old, has turned all the tongues of the soul’s serpents to stone.

When Stiefel rose to go, Firmian did not detain him, but insisted that he should allow them both to go with him, not to their own door only, but to his. They went out. The broad heaven, with the streets of the City of God all lit with the lamps which are suns, drew them on, out beyond the narrow crossways of the town, and into the great spectacle hall of night, where we breathe the blue of heaven, and drink the east breeze. We should conclude and sanctify all our chamber feasts by “going to church” in that cool, vast temple, that great cathedral whose dome is adorned with the sacred picture of the Most Holy, portrayed in a mosaic of stars. They roamed on refreshed and exalted by breezes of the coming spring hastening to blow before their appointed time, those breezes which wipe the snow away from the mountains. All nature gave promise of a mild winter—to lead the poor, who have no fuel, gently through the darkest quarter of the year—it was a season such as none curse except the rich, who can order sleighs but not snow.

The two men carried on a conversation befitting the sublimity of the night; Lenette said nothing. Firmian said, “How near together these miserable oyster banks, the villages, seem to be, and how small they are; when we go from one of these villages to another the journey seems to us about the same in length as a mite’s, if it crawled on a map from the name of the one to the name of the other, might appear to it. And to higher spirits our earth-ball may perhaps be a globe for their children, which their tutor turns and explains.”

“Yet,” said Stiefel, “there may very possibly be worlds even smaller than this earth of ours; and, after all, there must be something in ours since the Lord Christ died for it.” At this the warm blood rushed to Lenette’s heart. Firmian merely answered, “More Saviours than one have died for this world and mankind, and I am convinced that Christ will one day take many a good man by the hand, and say, ‘You have suffered under your Pontius Pilate too!’ And for that matter many a seeming Pilate is very likely a Messiah, if the truth were known.” Lenette’s secret dread was that her husband was really an absolute Atheist, or at all events a “philosopher.”

He led them by snaky windings and corkscrew paths to the churchyard; but suddenly his eyes grew moist, as one’s do when passing through a thick mist, when he thought of the mother’s grave with the flowers on it, and on Lenette who gave no sign of ever becoming one. He strove to expel the sadness from his heart by philosophic speeches. He said human beings and watches stop while they are being wound up for a new long day; and that he believed that those dark intervals of sleep and death, which break up and divide our existence into segments, prevent any one particular idea from getting to glare too brightly, and our never-cooling desires from searing us wholly—and oven our ideas from interflowing into confusion—just as the planetary systems are separated by gloomy wastes of space, and the solar systems by yet greater gulfs of darkness. That the human spirit could never take in and contain the endless stream of knowledge which flows throughout eternity, but that it sips it by portions at a time, with intervals between: the eternal day would blind our souls were it not broken into separate days by midsummer nights (which we call, now sleep, now death), framing its noons in a border of mornings and evenings.

Lenette was frightened, and would have liked to run away behind the wall and not go into the churchyard; however, she had to go in. Firmian, holding her closely to him, took a roundabout path to the place where the wreath was. He closed the little clattering metal gates which guarded the pious verses and the brief life-careers. They came to the better-class graves nearest the church, which lay round that fortress like a kind of moat. Here there were nothing but upright monuments standing over the quiet mummies below, while further on were mere trapdoors let down upon recumbent human beings. A bony head, which was sleeping in the open air, Firmian set a-rolling, and—heedless of Lenette’s oft-renewed entreaties to him not to make himself “unclean”—he took up in both his hands this last capsule case of a spirit of many dwelling places, and, looking into the empty window-openings of the ruined pleasure-house, said, “They ought to get up into the pulpit inside there at midnight, and put this scalped mask of our Personality down upon the desk in place of the Bible and the hourglass, and preach upon it as a text to the other heads sitting there still packed in their skins. They should have my head, if they liked to skin it after my decease, and hook it up in the church like a herring’s, upon a string, by way of angel at the font—so that the silly souls might for once in their lives look upward and then downward—for we hang and hover between heaven and the grave. The hazel-nut worm is still in our heads, Herr Schulrath, but it has gone through its transformation and flown out from this one, for there are two holes in it and a kernel of dust.”[^[51]]

Lenette was terrified at this godless jesting in such close proximity to ghosts; yet it was but a disguised form of mental exaltation. All at once she whispered, “There’s something looking down at us over the top of the charnel house. See, see, it’s raising itself higher up.” It was only the evening breeze lifting a cloud higher; but this cloud had the semblance of a bier resting on the roof, and a hand was stretched forth from it, while a star, shining close to the cloud’s edge, seemed like a white flower laid on the heart of the form which lay upon the bier of cloud.

“It is only a cloud,” said Firmian; “come nearer to the house, and then we shall lose sight of it.” This furnished him with the best possible pretext for leading her up to the blooming Eden in miniature upon the grave. When they had walked some twenty paces, the bier was hidden by the house. “Dear me,” said the Rath, “what may that be in flower there?” “Upon my life,” cried Firmian, “white and red roses, and forget-me-nots, wife.” She looked tremblingly, doubtingly, inquiringly at this resting-place of a heart, decked with a garland, at this altar with the sacrifice lying beneath it. “Very well then, Firmian,” she cried, “I’m sure I can’t help it, it is no fault of mine; but oh! you shouldn’t have done such a thing! oh dear! oh dear! will you never cease tormenting me!” She began to weep, and hid her streaming eyes on Stiefel’s arm.

For she, who was so delicately clever in nothing as in touchiness and taking umbrage, supposed this garland was the silken one from her wardrobe, and that her husband knew that Rosa had presented it to her, and had placed the flowers upon this grave of a woman, dead in childbed, in mockery either of her childlessness or of herself. These mutual misunderstandings were to the full as confounding to him as to her; he had to combat her errors, and at the same time ask himself what his own consisted of. It was only now that she told him that Rosa had some time since returned the pawned wreath to her. Upon the green thistle-plant of mistrust of her love, a flower or two now came out; nothing is more painful than when a person whom we love hides something from us for the first time, were it but the merest trifle. It was a great distress and disappointment to Firmian that the pleasant surprise he had prepared should have taken such a bitter turn. There was too much of the artificial about his garland to commence with, but the foul fiend, Chance, had malevolently crisped and twirled it up, with added weeds, into a more unreal and unnatural affair than ever. Let us take care then not to hire Chance into the heart’s service.

The Schulrath, at his wits’ end, gave vent to his embarrassment in a warm curse or two upon the Venner’s head; he tried to establish a peace congress between the husband and wife (who were sunk in silent musing), and strongly urged Lenette to give her hand to her husband and be reconciled to him. But nothing would induce her. Yet, after long hesitation, she agreed to do it, but only on condition that he would first wash his hands. Hers shrunk away in convulsive loathing from touching those which had been in contact with a skull.

The Schulrath took away the battle-flag from them, and delivered a peace-sermon which came warm from his heart. He reminded them what the place was in which they stood, surrounded by human beings all gone to their last account; he bade them think for a moment how near they were to the angels who guard the graves of the just, the very mother (he pointed out) who was mouldering at their feet, with her baby in her arms (and whose eldest son he himself was bringing along in his Latin studies—he was then in Scheller’s principia), might be said to be admonishing them not to fall out about a flower or two over her quiet grave, but rather to take them away as olive-branches of peace. Lenette’s heart drank his theologic holy water with far greater zest than Firmian’s pure, philosophic Alp water, and the latter’s lofty thoughts of Death shot athwart her soul without the slightest penetration. However, the sacrifice of reconciliation was accomplished and mutual letters of indulgence exchanged. At the same time, a peace like this, brought about by a third party, is always something in the nature of a mere suspension of hostilities. Strangely enough they both awoke in the morning with tears in their eyes, but could not tell whether happy dreams or sad ones had left these drops behind.

FIRST FLOWER PIECE.

THE DEAD CHRIST PROCLAIMS THAT THERE IS NO GOD.
INTRODUCTION.

My aim in writing this fiction must be my excuse for its audacity.

Men, as a class, deny God’s existence with about the same small amount of true consideration, conviction, and feeling as that with which most individual men admit it. Even in our regularly established systems of belief we form collections of mere words, game-counters, medallions—just as coin-collectors accumulate cabinetsful of coins—and not till long after our collection is made do we convert the words into sentiments, the coins into enjoyments. We may believe in the immortality of the soul for twenty years long, yet it may be the twenty-first before, in some one supreme moment, we suddenly perceive, to our astonishment, what this belief involves, and how wonderful is the warmth of that naphtha spring.

In a similar manner to this, I myself was suddenly horror-struck at the perception of the poison-power of that vapour which strikes with such suffocating fumes to the heart of him who enters the school of Atheistic doctrine. It would cause me less pain to deny immortality than to deny God’s existence. In the former case, what I lose is but a world hidden by clouds; but in the latter, I lose this present world, that is to say, its sun. The whole spiritual universe is shattered and shivered, by the hand of Atheism, into innumerable glittering quicksilver globules of individual personalities, running hither and thither at random, coalescing, and parting asunder without unity, coherence, or consistency. In all this wide universe there is none so utterly solitary and alone as a denier of God. With orphaned heart—a heart which has lost the Great Father—he mourns beside the immeasurable corpse of Nature, a corpse no longer animated or held together by the Great Spirit of the Universe—a corpse which grows in its grave; and by this corpse he mourns until he himself crumbles and falls away from it into nothingness. The wide earth lies before such an one like the great Egyptian sphinx of stone, half-buried in the desert sand; the immeasurable universe has become for him but the cold iron-mask upon an eternity which is without form and void.

I would also fain awaken, with this piece of fiction, some alarm in the hearts of certain masters and teachers (reading, as well as read); for, in truth, these men (now that they have come to do their appointed day’s work, like so many convicts, in the canal-diggings and in the mine-shaft excavations, of the “critical” schools of philosophy) discuss God’s existence as cold-bloodedly and chill-heartedly as though it were a question of the existence of the kraken or the unicorn.

For others, who have not progressed quite so far as this I would further remark, that the belief in immortality may without contradiction, co-exist with the belief in Atheism, for the self-same necessity which, in this life, placed my little shining dew-drop of a personality in a flower-cup and beneath a sun, can certainly do the same in a second life—ay, and could embody me with still greater ease for a second time than for the first.

When, in our childhood, we are told that, at midnight, when our sleep reaches near the soul and darkens our very dreams, the dead arise from theirs, and in the churches ape the religious services of the living, we shudder at death, because of the dead, and in the loneliness of night we turn our eyes in terror from the tall windows of the silent church, and dread to look at their pale shimmer to see whether it be truly the reflection of the moon’s beams—or something else!

Childhood and its terrors (even more than its pleasures) assume, in our dreams, wings and brightness, shining glowworm-like in the dark night of the soul. Extinguish not these little flickering sparks! Leave us the dim and painful dreams even; they serve to make life’s high-lights all the more brilliant. And what will ye give us in exchange for the dreams which raise and bear us up from beneath the roar of the falling cataract back to the peaceful mountain-heights of childhood, where the river of life was flowing as yet in peace, reflecting heaven upon its little surface, on towards the precipices of the future course.

Once on a summer evening I was lying upon a quiet hillside in the sun. I fell asleep, and dreamed that I awoke in a churchyard. The rattle of the wheels of the clock running down as it was striking eleven, had awakened me. I looked for the sun in the dark and void night sky, for I supposed that some eclipse was hiding it with the moon. And all the graves were open, and the iron doors of the charnel-house kept opening and shutting, moved by invisible hands. Athwart the walls shadows went flitting; but no bodies cast those shadows and there were others, too, moving about out in the open air. Within the open coffins there were none now asleep, except the children. Nothing was in the sky but sultry fog, heavy and grey, ranging there in great clammy folds; and some gigantic shadow closed and closed this fog as in a net, and drew it ever nearer, closer, and hotter. Up overhead I heard the thunder of distant avalanches, and beneath my feet the first footfalls of a boundless earthquake. The church was heaved and shaken to and fro by two terrific discords striving in it, beating in stormy effort to attain harmonious resolution. Now and then a greyish glimmer passed with rapid gleam flittering athwart the windows; but, whenever this glimmer came, the lead and iron of the frames always melted and ran rolling down. The fog’s net, and the quaking of the earth, drove me into the temple, past gleaming, glittering basilisks, brooding in poison-nests beside the door. I passed among shadows, strange and unknown to me; but they all bore the impress of the centuries. These shadows stood all grouped about the altar, and their breasts quivered and throbbed—their breasts but not their hearts. There was but one of the dead still lying on his pillow, and he was one who had but just been buried in the church; he lay at peace, his breast without a throb, a happy dream upon his smiling face. But now, as I came in (I, one of the living), his sleep broke, he awoke, and smiled no more; with painful effort he raised his heavy eyelids—and there was no eye beneath—and in his beating breast there was no heart, but a deep wound instead. He raised his hands, folded as it for prayer; but then his arms shot out and came apart from his poor trunk, the folded hands came off and fell away. Upon the dome above there was inscribed the dial of eternity—but figures there were none, and the dial itself was its own gnomon; a great black finger was pointing at it, and the dead strove hard to read the time upon it.

And at this point a lofty, noble form, bearing the impress of eternal sorrow, came sinking down towards our group, and rested on the altar; whereupon all the dead cried out, “Christ! Is there no God?”

He answered, “There is none.”

At this the dead quivered and trembled; but now it was not their breasts alone that throbbed; the quivering ran all through the shadows, so that one by one the shudder shook them into nothingness. And Christ spake on, saying, “I have traversed the worlds, I have risen to the suns, with the milky ways I have passed athwart the great waste spaces of the sky; there is no God. And I descended to where the very shadow cast by Being dies out and ends, and I gazed out into the gulf beyond, and cried, ‘Father, where art Thou?’ But answer came there none, save the eternal storm which rages on, controlled by none; and towards the west, above the chasm, a gleaming rainbow hung, but there was no sun to give it birth, and so it sank and fell by drops into the gulf. And when I looked up to the boundless universe for the Divine eye, behold, it glared at me from out a socket, empty and bottomless. Over the face of chaos brooded Eternity, chewing it for ever, again and yet again. Shriek on, then, discords, shatter the shadows with your shrieking din, for He is not!”

The pale and colourless shades flickered away to nothingness, as frosty fog dissolves before warm breath, and all grew void. Ah! then the dead children, who had been asleep out in the graves, awoke, and came into the temple, and fell down before the noble form (a sight to rend one’s heart), and cried, “Jesus, have we no Father?” He made answer, with streaming tears, “We are orphans all, both I and ye. We have no Father.”

Then the discords clashed and clanged more harshly yet; the shivering walls of the temple parted asunder, and the temple and the children sank—the earth and sun sank with them—and the boundless fabric of the universe sank down before us, while high on the summit of immeasurable nature Jesus stood and gazed upon the sinking universe, besprent with thousand suns, and like a mine dug in the face of black eternal night; the suns being miners’ lamps, and the milky way the veins of silvery ore.

And as he gazed upon the grinding mass of worlds, the wild torch dance of starry will-o’-the-wisps, and all the coral banks of throbbing hearts—and saw how world by world shook forth its glimmering souls on to the Ocean of Death—then He, sublime, loftiest of finite beings, raised his eyes towards the nothingness and boundless void, saying, “Oh dead, dumb, nothingness! necessity endless and chill! Oh! mad unreasoning Chance—when will ye dash this fabric into atoms, and me too? Chance, knowest thou—thou knowest not—when thou dost march, hurricane-winged, amid the whirling snow of stars, extinguishing sun after sun upon thy onward way, and when the sparkling dew of constellations ceases to gleam, as thou dost pass them by? How every soul in this great corpse-trench of an universe is utterly alone? I am alone—none by me—O Father, Father! where is that boundless breast of thine, that I may rest upon it? Alas! if every soul be its own father and creator, why shall it not be its own destroying angel too? Is this a man still near me? Wretched being! That petty life of thine is but the sigh of nature, or the echo of that sigh. Your wavering cloudy forms are but reflections of rays cast by a concave mirror upon the clouds of dust which shroud your world—dust which is dead men’s ashes. Look ye down into the chasm athwart the face of which the ash-clouds float and fly. A mist of worlds rises up from the Ocean of Death; the future is a gathering cloud, the present a falling vapour. Dost thou see and know thy earth?”

Here Christ looked downward, and his eyes grew full of tears, and he spake on, and said, “Alas! I, too, was once of that poor earth; then I was happy, then I still possessed my infinite Father, and I could look up from the hills with joy to the boundless heaven, and I could cry even in the bitterness of death, ‘My Father, take thy Son from out this bleeding earthly shell, and lift Him to thy heart.’ Alas! too happy dwellers upon earth, ye still believe in Him. Your sun, it may be, is setting at this hour, and amid flowers and brilliance, and with tears ye sink upon your knees, and, lifting up your hands in rapturous joy, ye cry each one aloud up to the open heavens, ‘Oh Father, infinite, eternal, hear! Thou knowest me in all my littleness, even as Thou knowest all things, and Thou seest my wounds and sorrows, and Thou wilt receive me after death and soothe and heal them all.’ Alas! unhappy souls! For after death these wounds will not be healed. But when the sad and weary lays down his worn and wounded frame upon the earth to sleep towards a fairer brighter morn all truth, goodness and joy,—behold! he awakes amid a howling chaos, in a night endless and everlasting; and no morning dawns, there is no healing hand, no everlasting Father. Oh, mortal, who standest near, if still thou breathest the breath of life, worship and pray to Him, or else thou losest Him for evermore.”

And I fell down and peered into the shining mass of worlds, and beheld the coils of the great serpent of eternity all twined about those worlds; these mighty coils began to writhe and rise, and then again they tightened and contracted, folding round the universe twice as closely as before; they wound about all nature in thousandfolds, and crashed the worlds together, and crushed down the boundless temple to a little churchyard chapel. And all grew narrow, and dark, and terrible. And then a great immeasurable bell began to swing in act to toll the last hour of Time, and shatter the fabric of the universe to countless atoms,—when my sleep broke up, and I awoke.

And my soul wept for joy that it could still worship God—my gladness, and my weeping, and my faith—these were my prayer! And as I rose the sun was gleaming low in the west, behind the ripe purple ears of corn, and casting in peace the reflection of his evening blushes over the sky to where the little moon was rising clear and cloudless in the east. And between the heaven and the earth, a gladsome, shortlived world was spreading tiny wings, and, like myself, living in the eternal Father’s sight. And from all nature round, on every hand, rose music-tones of peace and joy, a rich, soft, gentle harmony, like the sweet chime of bells at evening pealing far away.

SECOND FLOWER PIECE.

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM.

A sky of glorious and sublime beauty was spread out above this earth; a rainbow stood in the east, like the circle of eternity: a storm, with broken wings, passed thundering, as if weary, along by the lightning conductors, and away through the glowing gate of Eden in the west; the evening sun gazed after the storm with a brightness tender as if it shone through tears, resting its glance upon the great triumphal arch of Nature. All enraptured with the loveliness of the scene, I closed my eyes, and seeing nothing, save the sun shining warm and glowing through my lids, listened to the thunder as it died away in the far distance. And at length the mists of sleep sank down into my soul, and shrouded all the spring in folds of grey; but soon there came luminous bands of brightness piercing through the mist, and by-and-by shone many-tinted lines of beauty, and ere long the dark face of my sleep was painted with the brilliant pictures of the world of dreams.

And then I thought that I was standing in the second world, and all about me a dim green grassy plain, which, in the distance, merged into brighter flowers, and woods of glowing red, and hills so clear that you could see the lodes of gold within them. Beyond these crystal hills there glowed a bright rose dawn of morning, with dewy rainbows arching it all over. All the shining woods were sprent with suns (where earthly forests would have gleamed with drops of dew); while all the flowers were draped with nebulæ, as earthly flowers are hung with gossamer. At times the meadows shook, as waves of motion passed quivering over them—but this was not because the zephyrs bent the grasses in their play—it was that passing souls brushed them with unseen wings. I was invisible in this second world, for there this shell of ours is but a little shroud, a tiny fleck of fog not yet condensed.

And on the brink of this, the second world, reposed the holy Virgin near her Son; and she was looking downward to our earth, there as it floated dwarfed and far beneath, in its pale, feeble spring-time, on the mighty face of the Ocean of Death. And every wave was tossing it at will, and its dim light was nothing but the shadow of a shadow. Then Mary’s heart beat with a yearning pulse, when she beheld the old beloved world, and all her soul grew tender, and she said, with brightening glance, “Oh, Son! this heart of mine is full of longing, and mine eyes with tears, for all these my beloved human friends! Raise the earth near us, that I once more may look into the eyes of mine own race, my brothers, and my sisters. Ah! my tears will fall when I behold the living once again.”

But Christ replied, “The earth is but a dream of many dreams; and thou must sleep to see these dreams.”

And Mary answered, “I will gladly sleep that I may dream of man.” And then Christ said, “Say what the dream shall show thee.”

“Oh beloved! I would the dream would show me mankind’s love. Love such as hearts which meet once more in bliss after long painful parting only know.”

And as she spake it, lo! the angel of Death stood close behind her, and with closing eyes she sank upon his bosom, which was cold as polar ice. And then the little earth rose quivering up, but as it neared it paled and narrowed, and grew more dim and small. The clouds about it parted, and the cleft mists gave to view the little night in which it lay, and from a sleeping brook a star or two of the second world were mirrored back. And all the children lay sleeping on the earth, and all were smiling—for they had seen Mary appear to them as they slept, in semblance of a mother. But, in the night, stood one unhappy being, the power of outward grief almost gone from her, except in sighs which tore her breaking heart. Even her very tears had ceased to flow. Oh! gaze no more, sad soul, towards the west, where stands the house of mourning all behung with funeral crape; nor to the east, upon the grave and house of death. For this one day, turn thy sad gaze away from that drear charnel house where the loved corpse is laid, so that the cool night breeze may fan and wake him from his sleep earlier than if he were shut up within the narrow grave! Yet, no! bereaved one, gaze thy fill on thy beloved one while he still is here, and ere he falls to dust—and steep thy heart deep in the eternal woe.

As then an echo in the lone churchyard began to talk in faint and murmuring tones, repeating the notes of the low-voiced funeral hymn that rose within the house of mourning; and this after-song, floating half-heard in air—as though the dead were chanting low—tore all her heart in twain; and then her tears found vent and flowed anew, and wild with sorrow she raised her voice and cried, “For ever silent! oh my love, my love! Callest thou me once more? oh, speak again—but once—only this once, once more, to me whom thou hast left for ever! Ah, no! nothing but silence; no sound except the echo stirring among the graves. All the poor dead lie deaf beneath, and not a tone comes from the broken heart.”

But when the mourning hymn ceased of a sudden, and the dying echo from the graves sung faintly on alone, a tremor seized her, and her very life shook in the balance; for the echo came nearer and nearer, and from out the night one of the dead came close. And he stretched forth his pale and shadowy hand and took her own, saying, “My darling, why is it that you weep? Where have we been so long? for I have been dreaming that I had lost you!” But they had not lost each other. From Mary’s closed lids there fell some happy tears, and ere her son could wipe those tears away, the earth had sunk back to its place again—and on its face this happy pair, restored to one another, and in bliss.

Then all at once there rose a spark of fire up from the earth, and presently a soul hovered all trembling near the second world, as if in doubt whether to enter there. And Christ a second time raised up the earth ball, and the bodily frame from whence this soul had winged its way was lying still on earth, marked with the scars and wounds of a long life. Beside this fallen leafage of the soul a grey old man was standing, and, speaking to the corpse, he said, “I am as old as thou; why must my death be after thine, oh kind and faithful wife? Morning by morning, evening by evening, now, what can I do but think how deep thy grave, how far thy form has crumbled on its course to undistinguished dust, till my time comes to lie and crumble with thee side by side! I am alone! And what a loneliness is mine! For nothing hears me now. She cannot hear! Well! well! To-morrow I shall gaze with such a woe upon her faithful hands and her grey hairs that my poor broken life must snap and end. Oh, thou All-merciful! end it to-day; spare me that last great sorrow.”

Why should it be that, even in old age, when man has grown so weary and oppressed, and has descended to the lowest and last of all the steps that lead him downward to his grave, the spectre, Sorrow, sits so heavy upon him, bowing his head (where every bygone year has left its special thorns) to earth with a new despair?

But the Lord Christ sent not the angel of death with the hand of ice; for he himself looked on the bereaved old man, standing so near him now, with such a glance of glowing solar warmth that the ripe fruit broke from the tree. Like sudden flame his soul burst upwards from his riven heart, and hovering above the second world rejoined that other soul it loved so well; there knit together in silent close embrace, like those of old, they trembled downward into Elysium, where no embrace finds end. And Mary stretched, all love, her hands towards them, and all joy and rapture from her dream, she cried, “Ah, happy pair, ye are together now for evermore.”

But now there rose a pillar of red vapour up on high above the hapless earth, and clung there hiding with its dun folds a battle-field’s loud roar. At length the smoke parted asunder, and two bleeding men were seen lying enlocked in each other’s bleeding arms. They were two grand and glorious friends, and they had sacrificed all to each other, ay! and their very selves,—but not the Fatherland. “Lay thy wounds upon mine, beloved friend. The past lies all behind us now, we can be friends again; thou hast sacrificed me to the Fatherland, as I have thee. Give me thy heart again, ere it bleeds quite away. Alas! we can only die together now.” And each gave to his friend his pierced and wounded heart. But these glorious friends beamed with a lustre such that Death shrank back, and the great berg of ice, wherewith he crushes man, melted away at touching their warm hearts. And the earth kept those two, who rose above her level like two lofty mountains, dowering her with streams, with healing virtues, and with lofty views, she giving only clouds to them in return.

Mary in her dream here glanced and bent her head towards her son, for truly he alone can read, support, and succour hearts like these.

Why does she smile now, like some happy mother? Is it because the earth she loves so well, still rising nearer, seems to hover close above the border of the second world, sweet with the flowers of spring, while nightingales lie brooding, with those burning hearts of theirs pressed on the grasses and the meadow blooms,—the stormy skies all brightening into rainbows? Is it because the earth, never to be forgotten of her heart, now shows so happy and so gay bedecked in its spring dress, radiant in all its flowers, the joy hymn bursting from all its singers’ throats? No, not for this alone; that happy smile breaks over her sleeping face because she sees a mother and her child. For this must be a mother who bends down and holds her arms wide open, and calls in sweet enraptured tones, “Come, darling child, come to my heart again.” This is her child, we see and know, standing all innocence, within the ringing temple of the spring, by his good genius who teaches him—and now goes running up to that smiling form—thus early blest, pressed to that heart overflowing with a mother’s love, scarce understanding the blissful words she speaks. “Oh, dearest child, how thou delightest me. Art thou happy too? Thou lovest me! Oh, look at me, my own, and smile for evermore.”

But now the very blissfulness of her dream woke Mary up; and with a tender tremor she fell upon her own son’s heart, saying with tears, “None, save a mother, knows what it is to love.” And as she spoke the earth sank to its place (where its own æther flowed around its orb), and with it that glad mother with her arms about her child.

And all this bliss bursting upon my heart dissolved my dream. And I awoke—but nothing had truly changed or passed away; for the mother of my dream still clasped her child close to her heart here on earth’s face; she reads my dream, and, for its truth, forgives, perchance, the dreamer who tells his tale.

BOOK III.

CHAPTER IX.

A POTATO WAR WITH WOMEN—AND WITH MEN—A WALK IN DECEMBER—TINDER FOR JEALOUSY—A WAR OF SUCCESSION ON THE SUBJECT OF A PIECE OF CHECKED CALICO—RUPTURE WITH STIEFEL—SAD EVENING MUSIC.

I should very much like to make an incidental digression about this point; however, I feel that I don’t dare.

You see there are, now-a-days, so very few readers (at all events, of the younger and more aristocratic sort) who don’t know everything—while, at the same time, they expect their pet authors (and I don’t blame them for it) to know more than themselves—which is impossible. By the help of the English machinery (now brought to such high perfection), of encyclopædias, of encyclopædic-dictionaries, of conversations-lexicons, of excerpts from conversations-lexicons, of Ersch and Gruber’s ‘Universal Dictionaries of all the Sciences,’ a young man, after devoting his days to it for a month or two (he has no occasion to devote his nights) converts himself into a perfect Senatus Academicus of all the Faculties of a University, which he represents in his own single person; besides, in a sense, also himself standing to it in the relation of the student-body at the same time.

I have never, myself, met with a phenomenal youth of the sort above described, unless it were, perhaps, a fellow I once heard playing in the Baireuth band, who represented in his own person a whole Royal Academy of Music—a complete orchestra—inasmuch as he held, carried, and played upon instruments of every kind. This Panharmonist performing, to us partial harmonists only (as we were), blew a French horn, which he held under his right arm, and this right arm bowed a fiddle placed under his left; and that left arm beat, at the proper moments, a drum which was fastened on his back; his cap was hung round with bells, out of which he shook an accompaniment “alla Turca,” by moving his head, and he had a cymbal strapped upon each of his knees, which he banged vigorously together; so that the man was all music, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot So that, one is tempted to make this simile-man an occasion and ground-work of further similes, and liken him to a prince who represents in his own person all the instruments of his State, and all its members and representatives. Now, in the presence of readers who are all-knowers, just as this man was an all-player, how is a humble individual such as I, who am but a mere Heidelberg master of seven arts, at the outside, and doctor of a small trifle of philosophy, or so, to venture to take upon himself to attempt such a thing as a bit of a digression with any approach to the clever or the felicitous about it? No; the safe course, in the circumstances, for me is to go quietly on with my story.

We find the advocate, Siebenkæs, once more, then, in full blossom of hope; although that blossom is all sterile, and not of the sort which bears fruit. After his royal shot, he had reckoned upon, at any rate, as many happy days as the money would last for—upon fourteen at least; but mourning-black, now the traveller’s uniform, ought to have been the colour of his upon his earthly night-journey—that voyage pittoresque for poets. Though marmots and squirrels know how to plug up that particular hole in their dwellings which chances to be on the side from which the approaching storm is coming, men do not; Firmian thought if the hole in his purse was mended no more was necessary. Alas! a better thing than money now departed from him—Love. His good Lenette receded to a greater distance from his heart, as he did from hers, day by day.

Her having concealed from him the fact that Rosa had given back the wreath, formed in his heart (as foreign matter lodged in any vessel of the body always does) the nucleus of a gradual deposit of stone about it. But that was only a small matter.

For she brushed and scraped of a morning, and every morning, and that whether (as the saying goes) he “liked it or lumped it.”

She would persist, and insist, on communicating all her prorogations of parliament and other decrees to the servant girl, in several duplicates and revised copies, let him protest as much as he chose.

She asked him every thing she had to ask him (no matter what) two or three separate times over; and that whether he shouted beforehand like a quack doctor at a fair, or swore afterwards like one of his customers.

She continued to say, “It has struck four quarters to four o’clock.”

When he had proved, with immense care and trouble, that Augspurg was not in the Island of Cyprus, she would return him the quiet incontrovertible answer, “Well, it’s not in Roumania either, nor in Bulgaria, nor in the Principality of Jauer, nor in Vauduz, nor in the neighbourhood of Hüshen—two very little, insignificant places, both of them.” He could never bring her to give an unqualified assent, when he made the unconditional and positive assertion (in a loud voice), “It’s in Swabia—or the devil’s in it.” She would go no further than to admit that it was situated, in a certain sense, and to some extent, between Franconia, Bavaria, and Switzerland, &c.; it was only to the bookbinder’s wife that she would acknowledge that it was in Swabia.

Burdens, nay, overloads, of this sort, however, can be borne more or less easily and bravely by a soul fortified by the example of great sufferers—such as a Lycurgus, who let himself be deprived of an eye, and an Epictetus, who allowed his master to hack off his leg; and all these little failings of Lenette’s have been touched upon in a previous chapter. But I have to tell of new shortcomings besides; and as regards these, I leave it to unbiassed married men to determine whether they are among the matters which husbands can, and should, put up with.

Firstly: Lenette washed her hands forty times in the course of the day, at the very least; no matter what she touched, she must needs put herself through this process of Holy Re-baptism; like a Jew, she was rendered unclean by the propinquity of everything. She would far more probably have followed the example of Rabbi Akiba, than have been in the least astonished at his proceedings—who, when he was a captive in prison, and in the direst distress for water, instead of quenching his thirst with the very small quantity of it he could get, preferred to use it for his ablutions.

“Of course it is right and proper that she should be scrupulous about cleanliness,” said Siebenkæs, “and more so than I am; but there are limits to all things. Why doesn’t she rub herself with a towel when anybody breathes upon her? Why not purify her lips with soap after a fly has deposited itself (and not only itself) upon them? I’m sure she turns our sitting-room into a regular English man-of-war, scoured and holystoned from stem to stern every morning; and I look on as pleased as any officer on her quarter-deck.”

If a heavy Irish rain-cloud, or a waterspout with its attendant thunders and lightnings, came over his and her days, she always managed to put her husband right under water (like a Dutch fortress), with all his courageous energy, and gave free course to all her tears. But when the sun of happiness cast a feeble ray no broader than a window into the room, Lenette would always have a hundred things, other than this pleasant one, to attend to and to look at. Firmian had particularly made up his mind that he would most thoroughly winnow the husks from the corn of these few days during which he had a few shillings of ready money in his pocket; that he would skim off the cream of them, and completely hide, with a thick veil, the second Janus face, let it be smiling or weeping over the past or the future, as the case might be; but Lenette would insist upon rending this veil, and pointing to the hidden face. “My dear soul!” her husband more than once implored her, “do but wait till we’re as poor as church mice, and leading the life of a dog, again; then I’ll groan and moan with you with the greatest pleasure.” And she only once made him any pertinent answer, namely, “How long will it be before we’re without a farthing in the house?” But to this he was able to return a still more apposite reply: “If that is your way of looking at the matter, you will never be able to enjoy a single quiet, bright, happy day, unless one can give you his solemn oath that there will never come another dark, cloudy, wretched one again; in which case, of course, you can never enjoy one. What king or emperor—ay! and though he had thrones upon the head of him and crowns under his tail—can ever be sure but that any post-delivery, or any sitting of his parliament, may bring him a cloudy time of it; yet he passes his happy day in his Sans Souci, or his Bellevue (or whatever he may call it), and enjoys his life.” (She shook her head). “I can prove it to you in print, and from the Greek.” And, opening the New Testament, he read out the following passage (inserted by himself on the spur of the moment): “If, in a time of good fortune and happiness, thou delayest the joy of thine heart until a moment shall come in which nothing shall lie before thee save hopes in unbroken sequence for whole years to come, then there can be no true happiness on the face of this changing world. For after ten days, or years, some sorrow shall surely come; and thus thou canst delight in no May-day, though it shower blossoms and nightingales upon thee, since, beyond all doubt, the winter will come thereafter, with its nights and its snowflakes. Yet thou enjoyest thine ardent youth, not thinking with dread upon the ice-pit of age, which is ready in the background, with a gradually-increasing coldness to preserve thee for a certain season. Look, then, upon the glad To-day as a long youth; and let the sad Day-after-to-morrow appear unto thee but as a brief old age.”

“The Latin or the Greek always has a more religious sound, I know,” she answered, “and we often hear the thing in the pulpit, too; and whenever I do hear it preached I always go home and feel much comforted and consoled, till the money’s all gone again.”

He had greater difficulty still to get her to jump for joy quite to his liking at the dinner-table at mid-day. If, instead of their every-day fare, some extraordinary fleshpot of Egypt should chance to be smoking on the table—some dish such as the Counts of Wratislaw might have served, and the Counts of Waldstein have carved, without a blush—then Siebenkæs might be sure that his wife would have at least one hundred things more than usual to finish and to put away before she could come to dinner. There sits her husband, eager to begin; he looks round for her, quietly at first, angrily after a while, but keeps command of himself for two or three entire minutes, during which he has time to remember all his troubles as well as think about the roast—then, however, he discharges the first thunder-clap of his storm, and shouts, “Thunder and lightning! here have I been sitting for a whole Eternity, and everything getting as cold as charity. Wife! Wife!!”

In Lenette, as in other women, the cause of this was not ill-temper, neither was it stupidity, nor stubborn indifference to the matter or to her husband; she really could not do otherwise, however, and that’s quite sufficient explanation.

At the same time, my friend Siebenkæs—who will have this story in his hands even before the printer’s devils get hold of it—musn’t take it ill of me that I divulge to the world in general certain small breakfast-failings of his own—which he has communicated to me with his own lips. As he lay in his trellis-bed in the morning, before getting up, with his eyes closed, there would suddenly flash upon him ideas for his book, and forms in which to express them, such as never occurred to him while he was sitting or standing during the day; and, indeed, I have in the course of my reading found that there have been many men of learning—such, for instance, as Descartes, Abbé Galiani, Basedow—I, myself, too, whom of course I don’t count, who belonged to the Coleopterous family of backswimmers (Notonectæ), and got on quickest in the recumbent position, and in whose cases bed has been the brewing-kettle of their most brilliant and original ideas. I, myself, could point to many such which I have written down immediately after getting out of bed in the morning. Any one who sets himself to work to explain this phenomenon should adduce in the first place the matutinal power of the brain, and the fact of its lending itself with a more nimble, as well as vigorous obedience to the impulses of the spirit after its internal and external holiday of rest; next, the freedom and facility both of thinking and of brain mobility, which the manifold impulsions of the day has not yet begun to weary and impair; and, lastly, the vigour which is a peculiar property of all firstborn things—a vigour which our earliest morning thoughts possess in common with the first impressions of youth.

Now, after the above explanations, it will doubtless seem clear that, when the advocate lay in this fashion, sprouting and sending out long shoots in the warm forcing-house of the pillow, and bearing the most precious flowers and fruit, nothing could strike upon his ear in a harsher and more distracting manner than the voice of Lenette calling from the next room, “Come to breakfast, the coffee’s ready.” He generally gave birth to one or two more happy turns of expression after he did hear it, pricking his ears all the while, however, in dread of a second order to march. But as Lenette knew that he always allowed himself a considerable number of minutes of grace after the summons, she always cried, “Get up, the coffee’s cold,” when it was only just coming to the boil. The notonectic satirist, for his part, had observed the law which governed this precession of the equinoxes, and lay quietly among the feathers breeding his ideas happy and undisturbed when it was only once that she had summoned him, merely answering, “This very moment!” and availing himself of the double usance prescribed by law.

This obliged his wife, for her part, to go farther back, and when the coffee was made and standing by the fire, to cry, “Come, dear, it’s getting quite cold.” Now, on this system, of getting earlier on one side and later on the other, matters became more critical every day, with nowhere a prospect of extrication from the difficulty; in fact, what was naturally to be expected was the arrival of a state of things in which Lenette would end by calling him to get up a whole day too soon; although, in the end, this would eventuate in a mere restoration of the original condition of affairs, just as our suppers at the present day threaten to become too-early breakfasts, and our breakfasts unfashionably early dinners. Had Siebenkæs been able to bear the process of grinding the coffee, he might have moored himself to that as to an anchor of hope, and it would then have been a simple matter to calculate the time the coffee would take to get ready; but this he could not, for, in the absence of a coffee-mill, the coffee was bought ready ground (by everybody in the house, for that matter). If Lenette could have been induced to call him just one exact minute before the coffee was boiling and smoking, she would have done instead of the coffee-mill—however, she could not be induced.

What are trifling differences of opinion before marriage assume large dimensions thereafter—as north winds are warm in summer and cold in winter; the zephyr, when it is breathed forth by conjugal lungs, is like Homer’s zephyr, concerning the biting keenness of which the poet sings so much. For this period onward, Firmian set himself to look with much care and minuteness for every crack, feather, flaw, or cloudiness, which might be discoverable in that diamond—Lenette’s heart. Poor fellow! this being the case with thee, soon, soon must the crumbling altar of thy love go toppling down one stone after another, and the sacrificial fire flutter and go out.

He now discovered that she was not nearly as learned a woman as Mdlles. Burmann and Reiske. It is true no book wearied her, but neither did any interest her, and she could read her one book of Sermons as often as scholars can go through Homer and Kant. Her secular or “profane” authors were only two; in fact, one married pair of authors—the immortal authoress of her own cookery receipts, and that, lady’s husband—but the latter she never read. She paid his essays the tribute of her profoundest admiration, but she never glanced into them. Three sensible words with the bookbinder’s wife were of more value in her eyes than all the bookbinder’s and bookmaker’s printed ones put together. To a literary man who is making new arguments, and new ink, all the year long, it is incomprehensible how those persons who have neither a book, nor a pen, nor a drop of ink in the house (except the pale rusty liquid borrowed from the village schoolmaster) can exist at all. Firmian sometimes appointed himself a species of special Professor-extraordinary, and mounted the professional chair with the view of initiating Lenette into one or two of the elementary principles of Astronomy; but either she had no pineal gland (that manor-house of the soul and its ideas), or else the chambers of her brain were saturated, satiated, and crammed to the roof with lace, bonnets, shirts, and saucepans; at all events, it was beyond his power to get a single star into her head bigger than a reel of cotton. With Pneumatology (Psychology), again, his difficulty was exactly of the converse sort. In this branch of science, where the calculus of the infinitesimally small would have come to his aid with an equal amount of serviceableness as that of the infinitely great in astronomy, Lenette expanded and stretched out the dimensions of the angels, souls, and so forth, passing the minutest and most ethereal of spiritual beings through the stretching mill of her imagination, so that angels—of whom the scholiasts would have invited whole companies to a carpet-dance on the tip of a new needle (or have threaded them with it by couples on one and the same point of space)—expanded on her hands to such an extent that each angel would have filled a cradle by itself; and as for the Devil, he swelled out upon her till he got to be pretty much about the size of her husband.

Further, Siebenkæs discovered an iron-mould stain, a pock-mark or wart, on her heart; he could never warm her into a true lyric enthusiasm of Love, in which she should forget heaven and earth, and all things. She could count the strokes of the town clock amid his kisses; though some affecting story or discourse of his might bring the big tears to her eyes, she could still hear the soup-pot boiling over, and run away to it, tears and all. She would join devoutly in the hymns which came resounding from the other lodgers’ rooms of a Sunday, but in the middle of a verse ask the prosaic question, “What shall I warm for supper?” and he never could forget that, once, when she was listening, apparently much interested and quite touched, to one of his chamber-sermons on death and immortality, she looked at him, thoughtfully it is true, but with a glance directed downward, and said, “Don’t put on that left stocking to-morrow morning till I’ve darned it for you.”

The author of this tale declares that he has sometimes been driven nearly out of his mind by feminine entr’actes of this sort, against the occurrence of which there is no warranty for the man who soars up into the æther in company with these beautiful birds of paradise, and there hovers up and down with them, in the fond hope of hatching the eggs of his phantasies upon their backs up among the clouds.[^[52]] All in an instant, down drops the winged mate, as if by magic, with a green gleam, on to a clod of earth. I admit that this is but an excellence the more; it makes them resemble the hens, whose eyes the Great Optician of the Universe has made so perfect that they can see the most distant sparrow-hawk in the sky as well as the nearest grain of malt on the dunghill. It is to be hoped, indeed, that the author of this story, should he ever chance to marry, may meet with a wife to whom he may be able to give readings concerning the more essential principles and dictata of psychology and astronomy without her bringing in the subject of his stockings in the middle of his loftiest and fullest flights of enthusiasm; but yet he will be well content should one possessed of moderate excellencies fall to his lot—one who shall be capable of accompanying him, side by side with him, in his flights, so far as they may extend—whose eyes and heart may be wide enough to take in the blooming earth and the shining heavens in great, grand masses at a time, and not in mere infinitesimal particles; for whom this universe shall be something higher than a nursery and a ball-room; and who, with feelings delicate and tender, and a heart both pious and wide, should be continually making her husband better and holier. The author’s fondest wishes go not beyond this.

Thus, then, while the flowers, if not the leaves, were falling fast from Firmian’s love, Lenette’s was like a rose somewhat overblown, whose beauty a touch will scatter to the earth. Her husband’s endless arguments wearied her heart at length. Moreover, she was one of those women whose loveliest blossoms remain sterile and dead, unless children troop around to enjoy them, as the flowers of the vine do not produce grapes unless frequented by bees. She belonged to this class of women also in this respect, that she was born to be the spiral mainspring of a housekeeping engine—the stage-manageress of a great household theatre. Alas! the market-value of the shares, and the state of the treasury of the said theatre are well-known to everybody—from Hamburg to Ofen.

Moreover, our couple, like phœnixes and giants, were childless: the two columns stood apart and unconnected, no fruit garlands twining about them to bind them one to another. Firmian had, in imagination, thoroughly rehearsed the character of père de famille, and dispatcher of invitations to be godfather, but it never came to a performance.

What was most of all effective in breaking him away from Lenette’s heart, however, was his dissimilarity to Peltzstiefel. The Schulrath had in him as much of the wearisome, the deliberately circumspect, the grave and reserved, the stiff and starched, the pompous and inflated, the heavy and the dull, as——these three lines have; but this delighted the very soul of our born housekeeper. Siebenkæs, again, was like a jerboa from morning till night. She often said to him, “I’m sure people must think you’re not quite right in the head;” to which he would answer, “And am I?” He concealed the beauty of his character behind a comedy mask, and the trodden-down heels of the buskins he always wore made his stature seem shorter than it really was. The brief drama of his own life he turned into a mere burlesque and parodied epic, and it was from higher motives than mere vain folly that he so gave himself over to grotesque performances. In the first place he delighted with a deep delight in the sense of freedom of soul, and entire absence of all conventional trammels; secondly, he found pleasure in the thought that he travestied—not imitated—the follies of his fellow-men. In acting his part he had a double enjoyment—that of comedian as well as that of the spectator. A person who puts humour into action is a satirical improvisatore. Every male reader understands this though no female reader does. I have often wished that I could place in the hands of a woman, looking at the white sun-ray of wisdom broken into a tinted spectrum by the prism of humour, some powerful lens which should burn that spectrum back into its pristine whiteness,—but it is not to be done. The fine, delicate, womanly sense of the fit, the proper, the becoming, seems to be torn and scratched by the touch of anything angular and unpolished; these souls, so firmly welded on to the every-day, commonplace, conventional relations of things, cannot understand souls which place themselves in antagonism to these relations. And therefore it is that humorists are so rare in the hereditary kingdoms of women, courts—and in their realm of shadows, France.

Lenette could not be otherwise than much, and continually, vexed and annoyed with this whistling, singing, dancing husband of hers—a man who didn’t behave to his very clients with anything like proper professional gravity; who, sad to say—and people assured her it was a fact—often walked in circles round the gallows on the hill,—concerning whose sanity sensible people spoke very doubtfully—as to whom she complained, that you would never think, to see him, that he lived in a royal burgh, the capital of the province—and who was respectful and reserved only before one person in the world, namely, himself. Why, when maidservants, from the very best houses in the place, came in—with linen to be made up, and so on—didn’t they very often see him jump up and, without a “With your leave,” or “By your leave,” to anybody, run to his old, battered, rattling piano (it still had all its keys, and nearly as many strings), and there he would stand with a wooden yard-measure in his mouth, up which, as over a drawbridge, the notes climbed to him from the soundboard, then through the portcullis of his teeth, finally arriving at his soul by way of the Eustachian tube and the drum of the ear. He held this stork’s-beak of a yard-measure between his teeth as described in order to magnify the inaudible pianissimo of his piano into a fortissimo at its upper end. However, humour looks paler when reflected in narrative than in the vividness of reality.

That portion of earth’s surface on which these two stood was riven into two distinct islets by these continual tremblings of the soil, and these islets kept drifting steadily further and further apart. And ere long there came a serious shock of earthquake.

For the Heimlicher came on the stage again, with his plea of demurrer to Siebenkæs’s suit, in which all he demanded was justice and equity—in other words, the money which was in question, unless Siebenkæs could prove himself to be himself, that is to say, the ward, whose patrimony the Heimlicher had hitherto kept in his paternal hands and purse. This juridical Hell-river took Firmian’s breath away and struck ice-cold to his heart, though he had jumped over the three previous petitions for postponement as easily as the crowned lion over the three rivers in the Gotha coat-of-arms. The wounds which we receive from Fate soon heal, but those inflicted by the blunt and rusty torture-implement of an unjust man suppurate and take long to close. This cut, made into nerves already laid bare by so many a rude clutch and sharp tongue, caused our dear friend some severe pain; yet he had seen that the cut was coming long before it came, and had cried to his spirit, “Look out—mind your head!” Alas! there is something new in every pain. He had even taken legal steps in anticipation of it. A few weeks before he had had evidence sent from Leipsic, where he had studied, to prove that he had formerly been known by the name of Leibgeber, and was, consequently, Blaise’s ward. A young notary there, of the name of Giegold, an old college friend and literary brother in arms, had done him the service of seeing all the people who had known of his Leibgeberhood—particularly a rusty, musty old tutor, who had often been present when the guardian’s register-ships came in—and a postman, who had piloted them into port, and his landlord and other well-informed persons, who all took the Jus credulitalis (or oath of conviction), and whose evidence the young lawyer forwarded to Siebenkæs (like a mountain full of precious ore); he had no great difficulty, to speak of, in paying the postage of it, as he was king of the marksmen.

With this stout club of evidence he resisted and withstood his guardian and robber.

When Blaise’s denial was lodged, the timid Lenette gave herself and the suit up for lost; poverty, lean and bare, seemed in her eyes now to enmesh them in a network of parasite ivy, and there was no other prospect for them but to perish and fall to the ground. Her first proceeding was to burst into loud abuse of Von Meyern; for as he had himself told her that his father-in-law’s three applications for delay had been the result of his intercession, which he had made for her sake alone, she looked upon Blaise’s plea of demurrer as being the first thorn-sucker sent forth by Rosa’s revengeful soul in return for the imprisonment and the sacking he had undergone in Firmian’s house (and half ascribed to her), and for what he had lost.

Up to the day of the shooting-match he had supposed that the husband was his enemy, but not the wife; then, however, his pleasant conceit had been embittered and proved to be groundless. But the Venner not being present to hear her reproaches, she was obliged to turn the full stream of her anger on to her husband, to whom she attributed all the blame, because of his having so wickedly and sinfully changed names with Leibgeber. He who has married a wife will be prepared to relieve me of the trouble of mentioning that it made not the slightest difference what Siebenkæs said in reply or adduced concerning Blaise’s wickedness (who, being the greatest Judas Iscariot and corn-Jew the world contained, would have robbed him just the same if his name had been Leibgeber still, and would have found out a thousand legal byepaths by which to proceed to the plundering of his ward). It had no effect. At last the following words were forced out of him: “You are quite as unjust as I should be were I to attribute this document of Blaise’s to your behaviour to the Venner.” Nothing irritates women so much as derogatory comparisons; they apply them indiscriminately, without distinction. Lenette’s ears lengthened to tongues, like those of Rumour; her husband was immediately out-bawled and unlistened to.

He was obliged to send privately to Peltzstiefel to ask where he had been so long, and why he had utterly forgotten their house; Stiefel was not even in his own house, however, but out walking, for it was a beautiful day.

“Lenette,” said Siebenkæs suddenly—he often preferred vaulting over a marsh on the leaping-pole of an idea to wading painfully across it on the long stilts of syllogism, and was anxious to banish from her memory the innocent remark which he had let slip about Rosa, and which she had so utterly misunderstood—“Lenette, I’ll tell you what we’ll do this afternoon; we’ll take a strong cup of coffee, and go and take a walk and enjoy ourselves: it is not a Sunday, but it is the day which all the Catholics in the town keep holiday on as the feast of the Annunciation, and the weather is really too magnificent. We’ll go and sit in the big upstairs room at the Rifle Club-house, as it would be a little too warm outside perhaps, and we can look down from the windows and see all the heterodox people promenading in their best clothes—and our Lutheran Stiefel among them, who knows?”

Either I am more in error than I often am, or this was a most agreeable surprise to Lenette. Coffee, in the morning the water-of-baptism and altar-wine of the fair sex, is their love-philter and their waters-of-strife in the afternoon (the latter, however, only as regards the absent); but what a wondrous mill-stream for the setting in motion of the machinery of the ideas must an afternoon cup of coffee on a common working-day be for a woman such as Lenette, who rarely had any on other than Sunday afternoons; for before the days of the blockade of the continent it cost too much money.

A woman who is really very much delighted needs but a very short time to put on her black silk bonnet and take her big church-fan, and (contrary to all her ordinary manners and customs) be quite ready and dressed for a walk to the Rifle Club-house, even going the length of making the coffee during the process of dressing, so as to be able to take it, and the milk, with her in her hand.

Our couple set forth at two o’clock in the happiest possible frame of mind, carrying with them warm in their pockets what was to be warmed up later on in the afternoon.

Even at two o’clock, early as it was, the western and southern hills lay all beflooded with the warm evening glow with which the low December sun was bathing them, while great glaciers of cloud, ranged about the sky, cast their cheerful lights over the landscape. All about this world there beamed a beautiful brightness, which cheered and lighted up many a dark and narrow life.

Siebenkæs pointed out the eagle’s perch to Lenette while they were still at some distance from it—the alpenstock or boat-pole which had so recently helped him out of his most imminent difficulties. When they reached the Clubhouse he took her and showed her the shooter’s-stand where he had shot himself with his rifle up to the dignity of bird emperor, and out of the Frankfort-Jew’s-quarter of duns, liberating at his coronation at least one debtor, namely, himself. They had room and to spare to “spread themselves out” (so to speak) upstairs in the members’ hall—he at a writing-table by the right-hand window, and she with her work at another on the left.

How the coffee gave warmth to this December festival may be imagined, but not described.

Lenette put on one stocking of her husband’s after another—put them on her left arm, that is, while her right wielded the darning-needle; and as she sat, with a stocking generally quite open at the bottom, she was, as regarded one of her arms at all events, like a lady with the long, fashionable Danish mittens, with holes for the fingers. However, she did not raise these arm-stockings of hers high enough to be seen by the people walking in the upper walks, but kept nodding down her “your very humble and obedient servant” from the open window to numbers of the most genteel she-heretics as they passed, wearing her own works of art upon their heads, in honour of the Annunciation-feast; and more than one sent an obliging salute up to her roof-thatcher.

The strictest religious and political parity being established by law in Kuhschnappel, it was natural that Protestants of position should also go a-walking on this Catholic holiday. However, the advocate was perhaps enjoying himself quite as much as his wife; he went on writing his ‘Devil’s Papers,’ and at the same time feasting his gaze upon the high places, the sommités of the landscape, if not of Kuhschnappel society.

When he first entered the room he had a most agreeable reception from a child’s trumpet, left there by accident; the paint was not quite all licked away from it, and it was the smell of this paint, more even than the squeak of the trumpet, which pleased him so very much, by recalling the vague delights of Christmases of the past: so that pleasure was heaped upon pleasure. He could rise from his satires and point out to Lenette the great rooks’ nests in the leafless trees, and the bare tables and benches in the arbours, and the invisible guests who had occupied seats of the blessed there on summer evenings, and still remembered the time, looking forward to a repetition of it; and he could draw her attention to the fields, where, late as it was in the year, volunteer gardeneresses were gathering salad for him, namely, corn salad or rampion, which he might have some of for supper if he had a mind.

And now he sat at his window, with his eyes fixed upon the hills, all flushed with the evening red, the sun growing larger as it sunk towards them. Beyond these hills lay the lands where wandered his Leibgeber, sporting away his life.

“How delightful it is, wife,” he said, “that what parts me from Leibgeber is not a mere wide level plain, with nothing but a hillock or two cropping up here and there on it, but a grand, lofty wall of mountains, behind which he stands as if behind the grating of a monastery.” This sounded to her almost as if her husband was glad that this barrier stood between them; she herself had but little liking for Leibgeber, and considered him to be a sort of coin-clipper to her husband, who cut all his angles sharper than they were by nature; however, in dubious cases like this, she was always glad to ask no questions. What he had meant was exactly the reverse of what she supposed; he had meant that it is good, if parted from those we love, that it should be by holy hills, because they are, as it were, lofty garden-walls, behind which we picture the flowery thickets of our Edens; whereas, on the other verge of the broadest barnfloor of a level plain we only picture to ourselves a repetition of it sloping the other way. And this applies to nations as well as to individuals. The Luneburg moors or the Marklands of Prussia will not draw even an Italian’s longing gaze towards Italy; but when a Markman in Italy sees the Apennines, his heart yearns to his German loved ones behind them.

As Firmian looked upon that sunny mountain-barrier between two severed spirits, there was that in his eyes which much resembled tears; but he only turned his chair a little away, that Lenette might ask no questions; he was well aware of his old ingrained habit of getting angry when anybody asked what brought tears to his eyes, and he strove with it. Was he not, in fact, tenderness personified to-day, only acting his comedy in the palest middle-tints before his wife, because he was delighting in the fresh-growth of this enjoyment of hers, of which he was himself the origin. It is true she did not discover the existence of this, his feeling of delicate consideration for her; but just as he was quite content when no one but himself (least of all, she) perceived that he was poking fun at her (in the most delicate manner), so was he content that she should be in utter ignorance that he was causing her a little happiness.

At last they left the spacious room, the sun now robing them in purple hues; and as they went he drew Lenette’s attention to the liquid, golden splendour shining upon the roofs of the greenhouses, and he hung himself on to the sun—at that moment cut in two by the mountain-range—that he might sink, with it, to his far-away friend. Ah! how strong is love in distance—be it distance of space, or of time, of the future or the past—ay, or that greater distance still—beyond this world! And so the evening might very well have ended in an altogether delightful manner, had not something intervened.

For some particularly ingenious evil spirit or other had taken the Heimlicher von Blaise, and so set him down, promenading in the open air, that the advocate must needs come within shooting range and hailing distance of him just on a feast of the Annunciation for good folks only. When the guardian went through the proper forms of salutation—accompanying them with a smile such as, fortunately, can never be seen on a child’s face—Siebenkæs returned his salutes politely, although with a mere clutching and jerking at his hat—which he didn’t take off. Lenette tried to make amends for this, by doubling the profundity of her own bow and curtsey; but as soon as practicable she administered to her husband a garden lecture, or, rather, a garden paling lecture, on his always, as if on purpose, irritating his guardian whenever he had an opportunity. “Indeed, love,” he said, “I couldn’t help it. I really meant nothing of the kind to-day, of all days in the year.”

The truth of the matter, indeed, is, that Siebenkæs had sometime before complained to his wife that his hat, which was of softish felt, was getting a good deal spoiled by having to be so often taken off to people in the streets, and that he could think of nothing better than to protect it with a coat of mail in the shape of a stiff cover of green oilskin, so that when packed up in this pudding roll he might go on daily employing it in those offices of out-door politeness which men owe one to another, without ever having to take hold of the hat itself at all. Well, the first walk he took after assuming this double hat, or hat’s hat, was to a grocer’s, where he disembowelled the inner one from its envelope and swopped it away for six pounds of coffee, which warmed the four chambers of his brain better than the hare-skin had ever done; he then went tranquilly home, with only the coadjutor hat on his head, undetected, and thenceforward bore the empty case through the streets with a secret joy that, in a sense, he now really took off his hat to nobody—with other entertaining fancies bearing on the subject of his sugar-loaf.

Of course, when he forgot—and on that day in particular, it was perhaps excusable that he did so—to support his hat-case with the necessary framework of artificial rafters, it was really almost an impossibility to take this mere shell of a hat right OFF for purposes of salutation. The most he could do was just to touch it courteously, like an officer returning a salute; and thus, against his will, play the part of a rude and ill-bred individual.

And it so happened that just on this very day get it off he could not.

It was so ordained, however, that matters should not even rest here (as regarded our couple’s promenade), but one of the above-mentioned ingenious evil spirits changed the scene of the drama with such nimbleness, that we have a fresh combination before our eyes before we know where we are. Just in front of our wedded pair, a master tailor of the Catholic confession was taking his walk, most sprucely attired in honour of the Feast of the Annunciation, like all the rest of his pro- and CON-fession. As ill luck would have it, this tailor, being in a narrow walk, had (whether for fear of mud, or in the delight of his soul over his holiday) so elevated his coat-tails that the vertebral extremity, the os coccygis, or (shall we call it) insertion of the spinal cord, of his waistcoat, was clearly exhibited; in other words, the background of his waistcoat, which, as we know, is generally executed in colours more subdued than those used for the brighter and more prominent foreground on the chest of the wearer. “Hy! Mr.!” cried Lenette; “what are you doing with a lot of my chintz on the back of you?”

The truth was that this tailor had put aside and taken possession of so much of a nice green Augspurg chintz (sent to him by Lenette, on her becoming a queen, to make her a new body) as he considered proper and Christianly honest, calculating on the principle of “no charge for wine samples,” and this trifle of a sample had just barely sufficed to form a sober background to his pea-green waistcoat; and he had contented himself with so dim a reverse side for this waistcoat in the confident expectation that it would never be seen. However, as the tailor went on with his walk (after Lenette had shouted her query at him), as utterly unmoved as if it had nothing on earth to do with him, the little spark of her anger became a blazing flame, and, regardless of all her husband’s winks and whispers, she cried aloud, “Why, it’s my very own chintz, that I got all the way from Augspurg; do you hear, Mr. Mowser, you’ve stolen my chintz, you blackguard, you!” Then, and not till then, the guilty chintz-robber turned round with much sangfroid, and said, “Prove that, if you please! But, mind, I’ll CHINTZ YOU, if there be such a thing as law in all Kuhschnappel.”

At this she burst into a conflagration. Her husband’s prayers and entreaties were but as wind to her. “Ey! you riff-raff,” she snapped out. “But I’ll have what’s my own—you villain!” she cried. The only reply the tailor vouchsafed to this attack was this—he simply lifted his coat-tails with both hands high above the endorsed waistcoat, and, bending a little forward, said, “There!” after which he strode slowly on, keeping at the same focal distance from her, so as to bask in her warmth as long as possible.

Siebenkæs was the most to be pitied on this rich feast day, when, in spite of all his juristic and theological exorcisms, he could not cast out this devil of discord—when by good luck his guardian angel suddenly emerged from a side path, Peltzstiefel to wit, taking his walk. Gone, so far as Lenette was concerned, were the tailor, the quarter-ell of chintz, the apple of discord, and the devil thereof; the blue of her eyes and the blush on her cheek fronted Stiefel as bright and as fresh as the blue of the evening sky and the blush on its sunset clouds. Ten ells of chintz and half that number of tailors with waistcoat-backs of it into the bargain, were to her, at that moment, feathers light as air, not worth a word or a farthing; so that Siebenkæs saw on the instant that Stiefel’s coming was as that of a regular Mount of Olives all full of mere olive-branches of peace; although for discord devils hailing from another quarter there might without difficulty be pressed from the olives on said mountain an oil which could not be poured on any fire of matrimonial difference which Stiefel’s would be the bucket to put out. If Lenette was a tender, delicate, white butterfly, silently hovering and fluttering about Peltzstiefel’s flowery path, out of doors—when she got him into her house she was an absolute Greek Psyche; and, in spite of all my partiality for her, I am bound, under pain of having all the rest discredited, to insert in this protocol a clear statement (much as I regret to do so) to the effect that on this particular evening she gave one the idea of being nothing but some clear-winged translucent soul free from all trammels of body—which, at some former time, while as yet in the body, had stood in some love-relationship to the Schulrath, but now hovered about him with upraised pinions, and fanned him with fluttering downy plumes, and which at length weary of hovering, and pleased to rest once more on the loved perch of a body, settled upon Lenette’s, there being no other feminine one at hand, and there folded its wings to rest. Such seemed Lenette. But why was she thus to-day? Stiefel’s ignorance and delight at it were great; Firmian’s very small. Before I explain it, I will say, “I pity thee, poor husband, and thee, too, poor wife. For why must the smooth flow of the stream of your life (and of our own) be always broken by sorrows or by sins, and why cannot it fall into its grave in the Black Sea, without having to pass over thirteen cataracts, like the river Dnieper?” However, the reason why Lenette on this day in particular exhibited all her heart toward Stiefel, almost bared of the cloister grating of the breast, was that she was, just on this day, so keenly suffering under her misery—her poverty. Stiefel was full of genuine, solid treasures; Firmian’s were all lacquered. I know that her Siebenkæs, whom before marriage she had loved with the calm and cool regard of a wife, would have found that she would have come to love him after marriage with the warm affection of a fiancée, if he had only been able to give her the bare necessaries of life. There are hundreds of girls who bring themselves to believe that they love the man to whom they are engaged, whereas it is not till after marriage that the play becomes a reality—and that for good reasons, both metallic and physiological. In a well-filled room and kitchen, filled with a comfortable income, and twelve household labours of Hercules, Lenette would have been quite true to the advocate, though an entire philosophical society of Stiefels had sat down all round her, and would have said and thought, every hour of the day, “No more, thank you—I am helped;” but as things were, in a house and kitchen so empty as hers, the chambers of a woman’s heart grow full; in one word, no good comes of it. For a woman’s soul is by nature a beautiful fresco painted on rooms, table-leaves, dresses, silver salvers, and household plenishing in general. A woman has a large stock of virtue, but few virtues; she needs a confined sphere and social forms, and without these flower-sticks the pure white flowers trail in the dust of the border. A man may be a citizen of the world, and if he has nothing else to put his arms round he can press the entire earthly ball to his bosom, although he can’t put his arms round much more of it than will make him a grave. But a citizeness of the world is a giantess, and goes through the world with nothing but spectators, and is nothing but a character on the stage.

I ought to have described the whole of this evening much more circumstantially than I have done, for it was upon this evening that the wheels of the vis-à-vis phæton of wedded life began to smoke, as a consequence of the friction they had recently been subjected to, and threatened to break out into a blaze of the fire of jealousy. Jealousy is like Maria Theresa’s small-pox, which allowed that princess to pass with impunity through thirty hospitals, full of small-pox patients, but attacked her beneath the Crowns of Hungary and Germany. Siebenkæs had had on that of Kuhschnappel (the Bird-one) for a week or two now.

After this evening Stiefel, who took an increasing delight in sitting basking in the rays of the still rising Sun of Lenette, came oftener and oftener, and considered himself the peace-maker, not the peace-breaker.

It is now my duty to paint with the utmost minutiæ of detail the last and most important day of this year, the 31st of December, with its background and foreground all complete, and with all accessories.

Before the 31st of December arrived, of course Christmas came, a time which had to be gilt, and which turned Siebenkæs’s silver age (after the Royal shot) into a brazen and a wooden age. The money went. But, worse than that, poor Firmian had fretted, and laughed, himself into an illness. A man who has all his life, upon the upper wings of Fantasy and the lower wings of good spirits, skimmed lightly away over the tops of all the spread-net snares and the open pitfalls of life, does, if once he chances to get impaled upon the hard spines of the full-blown thistles (above the purple blossoms and the honey-vessels of which he used to hover) beat in a terrible way about him, hungry, bleeding, epileptically—a glad, happy man finds in the first sunstroke of trouble well-nigh his death-blow. To the polypus of anxiety daily growing in Siebenkæs’s heart add the effects of the work and excitement of authorship. He was very anxious to get done with his ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ at the earliest moment possible, so as to live on the price of them and carry on the law-suit besides. So that he sat through entire nights almost (and chairs as well). And in this way he wrote himself into an affection of the chest, such as the present author brought upon himself, and that, as far as he could make out, simply by excess of bountiful generosity towards the world of letters. He was attacked, just as I was, by a sudden pausing of the breath and of the action of the heart, succeeded by a blank disappearance of the spirit of life, and then by a throbbing rush of blood up to the brain; and this came on most frequently while he was sitting at his literary spinning-wheel and spool.[^[53]]

However, not a soul offers either of us one single farthing, by way of indemnification, on account of it. It would appear to be ordained that authors are not to go down to posterity in the body, but only in the form of portraits or plaster-casts; as delicate trout are boiled before being sent away as presents, people don’t put in the laurel-sprig (which is stuck into our mouths as lemons are into the wild boar’s) until we have been killed and dished. It would be a gratification to my colleagues and to me if a reader whose heart we have moved (as well as its auricles) were only to say as much as, “This sweet emotion of my heart was not produced without a hypochondriac palpitation of theirs.” We brighten and illuminate many a head which never dreams of thinking. “Yes, I have to thank them for this, it is true, but what is their reward? Why, pains in their own heads—kephalalgia and neuralgia in various forms!” Ay, he ought to interrupt me in the middle of a satire like this, and cry, “Great as is the pain which his satires cause me, they cause him far more; luckily, my pain is only mental!” Health of body only runs parallel with health of mind; it turns aside and departs from erudition, from over-much imagination, and from great profundity. All these as little indicate health of mind as corpulence, a runner’s feet, a wrestler’s arms, indicate health of body. I have often wished that all souls were bottled into their bodies as the Pyrmont water is put into its flasks. The best strength of it is allowed to escape first, because, otherwise, it would break the bottle; but it would seem that it is only in the case of colleges of cardinals (if we are to credit Gorani), cathedral chapters, &c., that this precaution is adopted, and that their extraordinary power of ability, which would other wise have burst their bodies up, is, as a preliminary measure, let off a good deal before they are put into bodies and sent upon earth; so that the bottles last quite well for seventy or eighty years.

With a sick mind, then, and a sick heart, without money, Siebenkæs begun the last day of the year. The day itself had put on its most beautiful summer-dress—one of Berlin blue; it was as cerulean as Krishna, or the new sect of Grahamites, or the Jews in Persia. It had had a fire lighted in the balloon-stove of the sun, and the snow, delicately candied upon the earth, melted into wintergreen, like the sugar on some cunningly-devised supper-dish, as soon as the hills were brought within reach of its warmth. The year seemed to be saying good-bye to Time as if with a cheerful warmth, attended with joyful tears. Firmian longed to run and sun himself upon the moist, green sward; but he had Professor Lang, of Baireuth, to review first.

He wrote reviews as many people offer up prayers—only in time of need. It was like the water-carrying of the Athenian, done that he might afterwards devote himself to the studies of his choice without dying of hunger. But when he was reviewing, he drew his satiric sting into its sheath, constructing his criticisms of material drawn only from his store of wax and his honey-bag. “Little authors,” he said, “are always better than their works, and great ones are worse than theirs. Why should I pardon moral failings—e.g. self-conceit—in the genius, and not in the dunce? Least of all should it be forgiven the genius. Unmerited poverty and ugliness do not deserve to be ridiculed; but they as little deserve it when they are merited—though I am aware Cicero is against me here—for a moral fault (and consequently its punishment) can, of a certainty, not be made greater by a chance physical consequence, which sometimes follows upon it, and sometimes does not. Can it? Does an extravagant person who chances to come to poverty deserve a severer punishment than one who does not? If anything, rather the reverse.” If we apply this to bad authors, from whose own eyes their lack of merit is hidden by an impenetrable veil of self-conceit, and at whose unoffending heart the critic discharges the fury which is aroused in him by their (offending) heads, we may, indeed, direct our bitterest irony against the race, but the individual will be best instructed by means of gentleness. I think it would be the gold-test, the trial-by-crucible, of a morally great and altogether perfect scholar to give him a bad, but celebrated book to review.

For my own part, I will allow myself to be reviewed by Dr. Merkel throughout eternity if I digress again in this chapter. Firmian worked in some haste at his notice of Lang’s essay, entitled “Præmissa Historiæ Superintendentium Generalium Bairuthi non Specialium—Continuatione XX.” It was quite essential that he should get hold of a dollar or two that day, and he also longed to go and take a walk, the weather was so motherly, so hatching. The new year fell on the Saturday, and as early as the Thursday (the day before the one we are writing of) Lenette had begun the holding of preliminary feasts of purification (she now washed daily more and more in advance of actual necessities); but to-day she was keeping a regular feast of in-gathering among the furniture, &c. The room was being put through a course of derivative treatment for the clearing away of all impurities. With her eye on her index expurgandorum, she thrust everything that had wooden legs into the water, and followed it herself with balls of soap; in short, she paddled and bubbled, in the Levitical purification of the room, in her warm, native element, for once in her life to her heart’s full content. As for Siebenkæs, he sat bolt-upright in purgatorial fire, already beginning to emit a smell of burning.

For, as it happened, he was rather madder than usual that day, to begin with. Firstly, because he had made up his mind that he would pawn the striped calico-gown in the afternoon, though whole nunneries were to shriek their loudest at it, and because he foresaw that he would have to grow exceedingly warm in consequence. And this resolve of resolves he had taken on this particular day, because (and this is at the same time the second reason why he was madder than usual)—because he was sorry that their good days were all gone again, and that their music of the spheres had all been marred by Lenette’s funereal Misereres.

“Wife!” he said, “I’m reviewing for money now, recollect.” She went on with her scraping. “I have got Professor Lang before me here—the seventh chapter of him, in which he treats of the sixth of the Superintendents-General of Bayreuth, Herr Stockfleth.” She was going to stop in a minute or two, but just then, you know, she really could NOT. Women are fond of doing everything “by and bye”—they like putting a thing off just for a minute or two, which is the reason why they put off even their arrival in this world a few minutes longer than boys do.[^[54]] “This essay,” he continued, with forced calmness, “ought to have been reviewed in the ‘Messenger’ six months ago, and it’ll never do for the ‘Messenger’ to be like the ‘Universal German Library’ and the Pope, and canonise people a century or so after date.”

If he had only been able to maintain his forced calmness for one minute longer, he would have got to the end of Lenette’s buzzing din; however, he couldn’t. “Oh! the devil take me, and you, too, and the ‘Messenger of the Gods’ into the bargain,” he burst out, starting up and dashing his pen on the floor. “I don’t know,” he went on, suddenly resuming his self-control, speaking in a faint, piteous tone, and sitting down, quite unnerved, feeling something like a man with cupping-glasses on all over him—“I don’t know a bit what I’m translating, or whether I’m writing Stockfleth or Lang. What a stupid arrangement it is that an advocate mayn’t be as deaf as a judge. If I were deaf, I should be exempt from torture then. Do you know how many people it takes to constitute a tumult by law? Either ten, or you by yourself in that washing academy of music of yours.” He was not so much inclined to be reasonable as to do as the Spanish innkeeper did, who charged the noise made by his guests in the bill. But now, having had her way, and gained her point, she was noiseless in word and deed.

He finished his critique in the forenoon, and sent it to Stiefel, his chief, who wrote back that he would bring the money for it himself in the evening, for he now seized upon every possible opportunity of paying a visit. At dinner Firmian (in whose head the sultry, fœtid vapour of ill-temper would not dissolve and fall), said, “I can’t understand how you come to care so very little about cleanliness and order. It would be better even if you rather overdid your cleanliness than otherwise. People say, what a pity it is such an orderly man as Siebenkæs should have such a slovenly kind of wife!” To irony of this sort, though she knew quite well it was irony, she always opposed regular formal arguments. He could never get her to enjoy these little jests instead of arguing about them, or join him in laughing at the masculine view of the question. The fact is, a woman abandons her opinion as soon as her husband adopts it. Even in church, the women sing the tunes an octave higher than the men that they may differ from them in all things.

In the afternoon the great, the momentous, hour approached in which the ostracism, the banishment from house and home, of the checked calico gown was at last to be carried out—the last and greatest deed of the year 1785. Of this signal for fight, this Timour’s and Muhammed’s red battle-flag, this Ziska’s hide, which always set them by the ears, his very soul was sick: he would have been delighted if somebody would have stolen it, simply to be quit of the wearisome, threadbare idea of the wretched rag for good and all. He did not hurry himself, but introduced his petition with all the wordy prolixity of an M.P. addressing the house (at home). He asked her to guess what might be the greatest kindness, the most signal favour which she could do him on this last day of the old year. He said he had an hereditary enemy, an Anti-Christ, a dragon, living under his roof; tares sown among his wheat by an enemy, which she could pull up if she chose; and, at last, he brought the checked calico gown out of the drawer, with a kind of twilight sorrow: “This,” he said, “is the bird of prey which pursues me; the net which Satan sets to catch me; his sheep-skin my martyr-robe, my Cassim’s slipper. Dearest, do me but this one favour—send it to the pawn-shop!”

“Don’t answer just yet,” he said, gently laying his hand on her lips; “let me just remind you what a stupid parish did when the only blacksmith there was in it was going to be hanged in the village. This parish thought it preferable to condemn an innocent master-tailor or two to the gallows, because they could be better spared. Now, a woman of your good sense must surely see how much easier and better it would be to let me take away this mere piece of tailor’s stitch-work, than metal things which we eat out of every day; the mourning calico won’t be wanted, you know, as long as I’m alive.”

“I’ve seen quite clearly for a long while past,” she said, “that you’ve made up your mind to carry off my mourning dress from me, by hook or by crook, whether I will or no. But I’m not going to let you have it. Suppose I were to say to you, pawn your watch, how would you like that?” Perhaps the reason why husbands get into the way of issuing their orders in a needlessly dictatorial manner is, that they generally have little effect, but rather confirm opposition than overcome it.

“Damnation!” he cried; “that’ll do, that’s quite enough! I’m not a turkey-cock, nor a bonassus neither, to be continually driven into a frenzy by a piece of coloured rag. It goes to the pawn-shop to-day, as sure as my name’s Siebenkæs.”

“Your name is Leibgeber as well,” said she.

“Devil fly away with me, if that calico remains in this house!” said he. On which she began to cry, and lament the bitter fortune which left her nothing now, not even the very clothes for her back. When thoughtless tears fall into a seething masculine heart, they often have the effect which drops of water have when they fall upon bubbling molten copper; the fluid mass bursts asunder with a great explosion.

“Heavenly, kind, gentle Devil,” said he, “do please come and break my neck for me. May God have pity on a woman like this! Very well, then, keep your calico; keep this Lenten altar-cloth of yours to yourself. But may the Devil fly away with me if I don’t cock the old deer’s horns that belonged to my father on to my head this very day, like a poacher on the pillory, and hawk them about the streets for sale in broad daylight. Ay. I give you my word of honour it shall be done, for all the fun it may afford every soul in the place. And I shall simply say that it is your doing; I’ll do it, as sure as there’s a devil in hell.”

He went, gnashing his teeth, to the window, and looked into the street, seeing vacancy. A rustic funeral was passing slowly by; the bier was a man’s shoulder, and on it tottered a child’s rude coffin.

Such a sight is a touching one, when one thinks of the little, obscure, human creature, passing over from the fœtal slumber to the slumber of death, from the amnion-membrane in this life to the shroud, that amnion-membrane of the next; whose eyes have closed at their first glimpse of this bright earth, without looking on the parents who now gaze after it with theirs so wet with tears; which has been loved without loving in return; whose little tongue moulders to dust before it has ever spoken; as does its face ere it has smiled upon this odd, contradictory, inconsistent orb of ours. These cut buds of this mould will find a stem on which great destiny will graft them, these flowers which, like some besides, close in sleep while it is still early morning, will yet feel the rays of a morning sun which will open them once more. As Firmian looked at the cold, shrouded child passing by, in this hour, when he was ignobly quarrelling about the mourning dress (which should mourn for him)—now, when the very last drops of the old year were flowing so fast away, and his heart, now becoming so terribly accustomed to these passing fainting fits, forbade him to hope that he could ever complete the new one—now, amid all these pains and sorrows, he seemed to hear the unseen river of Death murmuring under his feet (as the Chinese lead rushing brooks under the soil of their gardens), and the thin, brittle crust of ice on which he was standing seemed as if it would soon crack and sink with him into the watery depths. Unspeakably touched, he said to Lenette, “Perhaps you may be quite right, dear, after all, to keep your mourning dress; you may have some presentiment that I am not going to live. Do as you think best, then, dear; I would fain not embitter this last of December any more; I don’t know that it may not be my last in another sense, and that in another year I may not be nearer to that poor baby than you. I am going for a walk now.”

She said nothing; all this startled and surprised her. He hurried away, to escape the answer which was sure to come eventually; his absence would, in the circumstances, be the most eloquent kind of oratory. All persons are better than their outbreaks (or ebullitions)—that is, than their bad ones; for all are worse than their noble ones, also—and when we allow the former an hour or so to dissipate and disperse, we gain something better than our point—we gain our opponent. He left Lenette a very grave subject for cogitation, however,—the stag’s horns and his word of honour.

I have already once written it. The winter was lying on the ground all bare and naked, not even the bed-sheet and chrisom-cloth of snow thrown over it; there it lay beside the dry, withered mummy of the by-gone summer. Firmian looked with an unsatisfied gaze athwart unclothed fields (over which the cradle-quilt of the snow, and the white crape of the frost, had not yet been laid), and down at the streams, not yet struck palsied and speechless. Bright, warm days at the end of December soften us with a sadness in which there are four or five bitter drops more than in that belonging to the after-summer. Up to twelve o’clock at night, and until the thirty-first day of the twelfth month, the wintry, nocturnal, idea of dissolution and decay oppresses us; but as soon as it is one in the morning, and the first of January, a morning breeze, speaking of new life, moves away the clouds which were lying over our souls, and we begin to look for the dark, pure, morning blue, the rising of the star of morning and of spring. On a December day like this the pale, dim, stagnant world of stiffened, sapless, plants about us oppresses and hems us round; and the insect-collections lying beneath the vegetation, covered with earth; and the rafter-work of bare, dry, wrinkly trees; the December sun hanging in the sky at noon no higher than the June sun does at evening; all these combined shed a yellow lustre as of death (like that of burning alcohol) over the pale, faded meadows; and long giant shadows lie extended, motionless, everywhere—evening shadows of this evening of nature and of the year—like the ruined remains, the burnt-out ash-heaps of nights as long as themselves. But the glistening snow, on the other hand, spread over the blooming earth under us, is like the blue foreground of spring, or a white fog a foot or two in depth. The quiet dark sky lies above, and the white earth is like some white moon, whose sparkling ice-fields melt, as we draw nearer, into dark waving meadows of flowers.