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 _re_action _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 _in_corporeal 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.