Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkaes, Parish Advocate in the Burgh of Kuhschnappel.

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 the...

It was not the deeper blue of the sky (which, on the Saturday, was as rich and pure as in winter, or by night)--nor the thought of actually standing in the very presence of the...

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...

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-ban...

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...

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...

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 my...

Once, in the Easter week, when Firmian came home from a half-hour's pleasure-trip full of forced marches, Lenette asked him why he had not come back sooner, because the postman...

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 h...

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 rose...

I really cannot wish my hero a happy new year on a new year's day when, on his awaking in the morning, he rolls his swollen eyeballs heavily in their sockets towards the dawn, a...

I see more clearly every day that I and the other 999,999,999 human beings,[114] are nothing but so much skin-and-bone stuffed (like cooked chickens), full of a mass of incongru...

In the evening Henry drew up the curtain upon this tragedy (full of comic gravedigger business), and discovered Firmian lying on his bed speechless, with apoplectic head, and al...

If on some dewy, warm and starry night of spring the miners in some salt mine were to have their great penthouse-roof of earth lifted away from over their heads, and find themse...

Henry now plied more wings than any seraph, that he might fly up with his friend as soon as possible. He packed up the latter's manuscripts in haste, and addressed them to Vaduz...

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 expect...

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...

One night, at about eleven o'clock, a tremendous blow was heard to strike the roof-tree, as if two or three hundredweights of Alps had come down upon it. Lenette went upstairs w...

When, in my last chapter, I spoke of ladies who were given to brevity of sleep, and awoke six hours before their sisters at the Antipodes, I think I did well not to cram into my...

In my last chapter I practised a deception on the reader out of pure goodwill towards him; however, I must let him remain undeceived until he has read the following letter of Le...

As a step preliminary to everything else, Leibgeber quartered the sorrowing widow down stairs with the hairdresser, with the view of rendering the intermediate state after death...

It is a matter which often quite puts me beyond myself that, although we _do_, in the end, duly accept and honour the bills which Virtue draws upon us, we only _pay_ them after...

We next meet our Firmian (promoted to higher rank on his retirement from the world, as officers are on theirs from the service, to that of Inspector, namely) in the Inspector's...

Although Sunday was come, and the Vicar's eyes were no more open than his congregation's (because, like many of the clergy, he kept his physical eyes shut while preaching), my h...

Firmian took his departure. He was sorry to leave the hotel, which had been a royal "Sans Souci" and "mon repos" to him, and turn his face away from its comfortable chambers tow...

The last chapter was as brief as our delusions. It was one itself, alas! poor Firmian. After the first stormy mutual catechisings, and particularly, after the giving and receivi...