The Murderous Duel.–Apology for the Duel.–Prisons regarded as Temples.–Job's-Wails of the Parson.–Legends of my Biographical Past.–Potato-Planting.

As I am on the point of entering upon the fortieth day with the observation, "The history of the duel is still full of regular ciphers, and is a true unfigured thorough-bass,"-a piece of the forty-third comes to hand and figures the bass and puts the vowel-points to the Hebrew consonants. To this young forerunning^[162] of the forty-third chapter one is indebted for the fact that I can relate the shooting-history with better spirits.

It will not be guessed who boiled up the most furiously at Clotilda's engagement,–namely, the Evangelist. He was vexed with the bold faithlessness of the Chamberlain, whose courtliness he had hitherto managed by coarseness, and so much the more because a human mixture of imbecility and flattery like Le Baut exasperates us unspeakably, when it passes over from flatteries to insults. Still more was he who set on Flamin himself set on by the widow of the Chamberlain, who stirred into his elementary fire soft oil and some matches; she hated Clotilda because she was loved, and our hero because he did not, like the Evangelist, set the step-mother above the step-daughter. A woman who has gone to the death for a man, i. e. into a short sleep (which is death to the good), namely, into a swoon,–as this very widow did in the Eighth Post-Day,–must be expected of course to hate this man, if he will not let himself be loved. The Evangelist, who had hitherto taken the love of Victor and Clotilda only for the accidental gallantry of a moment, and who had also looked upon the flying attachment to his sister Joachime as nothing more serious, was devilishly mad at the mis-shot in the first case, and at the royal shot in the second; and he determined to avenge himself and his sister, whom he loved more than his father, on both.

Joachime was additionally and bitterly enraged with Victor, because she believed herself and her love to have been hitherto abused as a mere cloak for his love to Clotilda. I have stated above that Matthieu, after the Eymann visit, made his to Flamin. When the Councillor had disclosed to him the interview with the Parson and his decisory oath, Mat formed his resolution and threw much upon the Chamberlain: "This fellow was a small sharper and a great courtier,–he had perhaps had more to do than the lover had with Clotilda's excursion to the baths of Maienthal,–he, and not so much Victor, sought to make out of his daughter a lark's net for the Prince's heart and a gradus ad Parnassum of the Court." Flamin was right down glad that his vengeance had got another object besides him with whom he had sworn to his father not to quarrel. Meanwhile he did not conceal from the Councillor (to be impartial) that the Apothecary proclaimed everywhere, from exasperation against Sebastian, that the latter had gotten the plan of this marriage as a stepping-stone to promotion entirely from him, from Zeusel. Flamin, in such bone-fractures of the breast, always resorted at once to the chalybeate (steel-cure) of the sword, the lead-water of bullets; and the cautery of the sabre; and as the duel with Victor, one of noble extraction, had spoiled him, he would also in the first heat have proposed it to the three-buttoned^[163] fellow, when Mat ridiculed the incompetent plebeian. Flamin cursed in vain fury his defect of ancestry, which hindered him from letting himself be shot by one ancestrally endowed; nay, he would have been capable–as he kindled quickly and yet cooled slowly–for a mere verbal insult from a nobleman (as one actually did on a certain occasion)–of becoming a soldier, then an officer and a nobleman, merely for the sake of afterward summoning the canonical and challengeable defamer before the muzzle of his pistol.

But the faithful Matthieu,–whose spotted soul turned a different side to every one, like the sun, which, according to Ferguson, on account of its spots, revolves on its axis, so as to give all the planets equal light,–he understood the business; he said, he would in his own name challenge the Chamberlain, and in fact to a masked duel, and then Flamin in the disguise could take his part, while he himself stood by under the name of the third Englishman, and the two others as seconds.

Flamin was overmastered by rapidity; but now again there was a want of something, which is still more indispensable than nobility to a game of fighting,–namely, of a good, legitimate offence. Matthieu, to be sure, was ready with pleasure to offer one to the man which should adequately justify a duel; but the man with the Chamberlain's master-key was one who, there was every reason to fear, would forgive it,–and there would be nobody to shoot.–Most fortunately the Evangelist remembered, that he himself had already received one from him, which he knew how profitably and honestly to bring to bear upon the case: "Le Baut had, indeed, three years before, as good as promised him his daughter; and however indifferent this perjury was in itself, still, as a pretext for the chastisement of a greater fault, it retained its full value." ... Thus on a smutty tongue does truth take the form of a lie, provided the lie cannot dress itself in that of truth. And Flamin did not dream that his alleged groomsman was no other than the veritable Sabine robber of his bride.

I am concerned lest it should be thought that Matthieu imputes to a Chamberlain, especially one with whom making and keeping a promise were the most distant cousins, less full-power of lying than to a Court-Page, and that he forgets how, in general, one gets over the stream of the court and of life as over any natural one, not in a direct line, but in a diagonal and oblique manner. But the rascal despises the rascal still more than he hates the good man. Besides, he acted thus not merely from passion, but from calculation: if Flamin were killed, then he must needs receive from Agnola, who now was becoming more and more the Princess of the Prince, and for whom naturally an after-bloom of January's and his Lordship's former sowings was a hedge of thorns, the honest man's fee and fairing, and a higher place on the merit-roll of the court;–furthermore, his Lordship in that case could no longer trundle through the gate and bring word, "Your Grace's son is to be had and is alive."–If the Chamberlain fell, then, too, the result was not to be despised; this former boarder and protÉgÉ^[164] of the princely crown was, after all, gone to the Devil, and his Lordship would have at least to be ashamed to think that by his silence he had entangled the Regency-Councillor in a deadly relation with a man to whom he had, at all events, publicly to pay the veneration of a son. Matthieu could not lose,–besides, he could disguise or disclose his knowledge of Flamin's extraction, as the case might require.

As there was nothing to prevent the Englishmen's being seconds, Flamin said, Yes; but Le Baut said, No, when he received Mat's manifesto and war-articles; he was frightened to death almost at the very death-prescription without the ingredient of the bullet. I shall never so belittle a courtier, as to allege that he declines such a potato-war from virtue or from faint-heartedness,–such men tremble certainly not at death, but merely at a disgrace,–but this latter, which Le Baut feared at the hands of the Prince and Minister, was precisely what deterred him. He therefore, on fine paper and with fine turns of expression, which outsparkled the black sand, represented to Mat their former friendship, and dehortations from this glaring "ordeal,"^[165] and declared himself besides entirely willing to do everything which his honor–would be offended at, in case he only were not obliged by this sham-fight to violate the laws of the duel. But he was,–Matthieu wrote back, he would pledge himself for the secrecy as well as for the silence of the seconds, and he made the additional proposal to him, that they should insinuate into each other dragon-^[166] and pitch-balls in the night and in masks; "for the rest he remained in future his friend as ever, and would visit him, for only honor demanded of him this step." ... And of the Chamberlain too;–for these men swallow only great offences, but no little ones, just as those bitten by mad dogs can get down solids, but no liquids,–and herewith in my eyes is a courtier like Le Baut sufficiently excused, if he makes believe he were an honest man, or as if he were very different from those who pawn their honor for the whole year, and–as in the case of imperial pledges or living pledges of love–never redeem the pawn.

All was fixed for the very evening when Victor sorrowfully entered into Maienthal,–the theatre of war was between St. Luna and the city.

EXTRA-LEAF IN DEFENCE OF THE DUEL.

In my opinion the state favors duelling in order to set limits to the increase of the nobility, as Titus for that very reason made the Jews challenge each other. As in chanceries they still continue to make nobles, but no burghers,–as, besides, a burgher must always be used and demolished for the purpose, before the Imperial Chancery can set up a nobleman on his building-ground,–as standing armies and coronations increase simultaneously, and consequently the manufacture of nobles too; the state would accordingly possess too many, certainly, rather than too few noblemen (as is not the case, however), were not a mutual shooting or stabbing of each other allowed them. In reference to the petty princes who are made in the chancery-bakehouse, nothing more were to be wished than that at the same time subjects also–say one or two herds, with every prince–should fall off from the potter's-wheel; just as, in fact, I know no reason, either, why the Imperial Chancery will make poets only, when it might certainly quite as well scrape off from its saltpetre wall historians, publicists, biographers, reviewers.–Let it not be objected to me, that at court they seldom shoot each other; here Nature herself has in another way set beneficial bounds to the increase of courtiers. Somewhat as with marmots, of whose depopulation Bechstein finds a wise design in the fact, that, though they generally assert their own with a malicious rabidity, nevertheless they do not reckon their brood as their own, but willingly let it go. Even Dr. Fenk may possibly be nearer right, who takes their part and says, he grants they are of no use to the weightier members of the state, the teaching class, the peasantry, &c., but of much, however, to the lesser, unprofitable members, the mass-attendants of the stomach and of luxury, the mistresses, the lackey-department, &c., and that an impartial person must compare them with the stinging nettles, on which, while they are of little use to men and large animals, most of the insects get their living.

End of this Apologetic Extra-Leaf.

Flamin's soul worked itself off all day in images of revenge. In such a boiling of the blood, moral skin-moles became to him bone-black,^[167] the typographical mistakes of the state appeared to him as grammatical blunders, the peccata splendida of the regency-college as black vices. To-day, too, he saw the Prince always before his eyes, whom in the clubs of the twins and still more in relation to Clotilda he mortally hated. He despised the load of life, and in this heat, wherein all materials of his inner being were melted into one flood, the inner lava sought an outbreak in some foolhardy venture. His to-day's exasperation was, after all, a daughter of virtue; but the daughter grew over the mother's head. The three twins, who, although not with the tongue, yet with the head, were as wild as he, kindled absolutely the whole vaporous atmosphere of his full soul.

At length, when night came, the two seconds and Flamin and Matthieu disguised as the third Englishman rode out to the shooting-ground. Flamin contended furiously with his prancing, smoking steed. By and by a gray nag brought along in curvets the Chamberlain. Mutely they measure off the murdering and shooting distance, and exchange pistols. Flamin, as insulted party, first lets fly like a storm against the other; and, on his snorting steed, and in the trembling of rage, he shoots his ball away over his adversary's–life. The Chamberlain fired intentionally and openly far aside from his antagonist, because the fall of the (supposed) Matthieu would have killed at the same time his whole prosperity at court. Matthieu, with all his slyness, too precipitate and too full of energy, foaming already amidst the very preparations for the fight, and still more exasperated at the frustration of both his alternatives, and too proud to let himself be shamed before the Englishmen by receiving his life as a present under another's name and from so contemptible an adversary, thrust down his own mask and Flamin's too, and rode coldly up to the Chamberlain and said, by way of humiliating him with the disclosure of his ignoble opponent, "You have been under a mistake about rank,–but now let us exchange shots." ... Le Baut stuttered, confused and offended; but Matthieu backed his horse–stopped–screamed–shot with petrified arm, and hit, and snuffed out the bald life of poor Le Baut.... Quick as lightning he said to all, "To Count O.'s!" and–with the conviction of an early and easy forgiveness on the part of the princely couple and of the widow–trotted off over the limits towards Kussewitz.

Flamin became an iceberg,–then a volcano,–then a wild-fire,–then he grasped the hands of the Britons, and said: "I, only I, have killed this man. My friend would have had no quarrel with him; but, as he has sinned for me, it is my duty to suffer for him.–I will die: I shall give myself up to the judges as the murderer, that I may be executed,–and you must back my asseveration."–But he disclosed to them now a much higher motive for his bold lie; "If I die," said he, more and more glowingly, "they will have to let me say at the place of execution what I will. Then will I throw flames among the people, which shall turn the throne to ashes. I will say, 'Lo! here beside the sword of justice I am as firm and cheerful as you; and yet I have sent only one good-for-nothing fellow out of the world. You could catch and confine bloodsuckers, wolves, and serpents, and a lamb-vulture at once;–you could reap a life full of freedom, or a death full of fame. Are then the thousand staring eyes around me all blind with the cataract, the arms all palsied, that none will see and hurl away the long bloodsucker that crawls over you all, and whose tail is cut off, so that the court and the boards in turn suck from it behind? Lo! I too was once part and parcel of all that, and saw how they flay you,–and how the messieurs of the court go about in your skins. Take one look into the city; are yours the palaces or the dog-kennels? The long pleasure-gardens in which they walk, or the stony fields in which you must work yourselves–to death? You toil, indeed; but you have nothing, you are nothing, you become nothing,–on the contrary the lazy, dead Chamberlain there beside me'" ... No one smiled; but he came to himself. The three twins, to whom the body and time and the throne were a fire-proof wall, or a stove-screen against their self-devouring blaze of freedom, vowed to him tied tongues, steadfast hearts, and active hands; yet were they silently resolved, after the flashing speech, to rescue him with their blood, and to reveal his innocence. One consequence of this dithyrambic of freedom was, that Cato the Elder, the day after, blew up in the storm the powder-house at Maienthal, which was the only powder-magazine in the country (magazines of corn they had not so many), as he rode towards Kussewitz to join Matthieu.

Now they carried the lie into the village, that Flamin had availed himself of Matthieu's disguise, and in a similar one had attacked the Chamberlain, whom, for want of ancestors, he could not shoot in duel, and blown out with a pistol his lamp of life. The Regency-Councillor was, upon a slight, specious flight, arrested, and placed as a statue of a god alone in that temple, which, like the old temples, was without windows or furniture, and which the gods inhabiting them furnish, as Diogenes did his tub, with inscriptions, and which the common man calls merely a prison.—I will, however, first and foremost, call this and the following words an

EXTRA-LEAF.

The chapel or vestry of such a temple is further called a dog's hole or dungeon. The priests and fellows of this pagoda are the gaolers and constables. In fact, the times are no more when the great folk were indifferent to truths; now they rather seek out a man who has uttered weighty ones, and hunt after him, and (with more justice than the Tyrians did their god Hercules) make him fast in the aforesaid temples with chains and iron postillons d'amour, that he may there on this insulating-stool (Isolatorio) the better concentrate and accumulate his electric fire and light. When once such a Mercury is so fixed; and has for a sufficient length of time had, in common with the fixed stars, beside light, immobility also, then they can finally, if more has been made out of him by this process, get him even up to the tripod,–as they call the gallows,–for a hanging seal of truth, where he can shrink up into a regular, dried, natural specimen, because he may not otherwise be stuck as a useful example into the herbarium vivum of the philosophic martyrology. Such a hanging is a more dignified and profitable imitation of the crucifixion of Christ, than I have seen in ever so many Catholic Churches on Good Friday, and in fact not a whit less forcible than that which Michael Angelo, according to the tradition, arranged, who crucified re ver the man who sat, or rather hung, to him for the Crucified. Hence in Catholic countries, beside the bloodless masses, there are sundry bloody ones; for such a quasi Christ, who is raised by a little hemp, not into the third heaven, but still into the tremulous heaven^[168] (coelum trepidationis), must–and for that reason they slay him–render to his doctrines by his death the service which the higher death of the Cross once rendered. And verily the dead still preach;–to die for the truth is a death not for one's country, but for the world;–the truth, like the Medicean Venus, is handed over in thirty fragments to posterity; but posterity will fit them together again to form a goddess,–and thy temple, eternal Truth, which now stands half under the earth, undermined by the burials of thy martyrs, will at last rear itself above the earth, and stand, made of iron, with every pillar in a precious grave!

End.

Cato rode after Matthieu, who had fled to Kussewitz, and laid before him, with French eloquence, Flamin's plan to die, and their own to save him. Mat approved all, but he believed nothing of it; he still staid over the limits. Yet he begged for himself the favor, not to take it ill of him, if he should requite Flamin's noble sacrifice with something which would be against their plan, but beyond their hopes. Would he perhaps mention to the Prince that his son lay in prison?

In three minutes the readers and I will go into the apothecary's shop to our hero, when we have waited only to be first informed that, as the riderless, bloody nag of the Chamberlain and the three twins with the lying Job's tidings of the murder came up to the window of the parsonage, the Court Chaplain was lathered and half shaved. He had therefore to sit still, and only say slowly under the razor: "O sorrow above all sorrows!–pray shave quicker, dear Mr. Surgeon,–wife, howl for me!" He waved his hand loosely in his suppressed agony, in order not to shake his arm and chin: "For God's sake, can't you scrape more speedily?–You have a poor Job under the razor,–it is my last beard,–they will march me and my household off to prison.–Thou unnatural child, thy father may be decapitated for thy sake, you Cain, you!" He ran to every window: "God have mercy on us! the whole parish has by this time got wind of it.–Dost thou see, wife, what a Satan we have together brought up and borne: it is thy fault.–What is the fellow listening there for? Shear off to your customers, Mr. Shearer, and don't go to blackening your spiritual shepherd anywhere, nor spread the news about."—At this moment came the gentle Clotilda, downcast and with her handkerchief in her hand, because she guessed what the heart of a disconsolate mother needed; namely, two loving arms as a band around the shattered breast, and a thousand balsam-drops of another's tears upon the splintered and swelling heart. She went up to the mother with open arms, and enfolded her therein with speechless weeping. The whimsical Parson fell at her feet and cried: "Mercy, mercy! none of us knew a word about it. I only heard of the murder just now while in the hands of the barber. I lament only for your sainted father and his relicts.–Who could have said ten years ago, good lady, that I should have raised a scamp that would shoot down my master and patron? I am a ruined man, and my wife too. I can no longer now for shame be Senior Consistorii.–I can send off no christening paper and present to his Highness, even though my wife should be taken in labor on the spot.–And if they behead my son, it will bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave."–When Clotilda, without smiling, assured him, on her sacred word, that there was an infallible way of rescue,–by which she meant Flamin's princely extraction,–then the Chaplain looked on her with sparkling eyes and dumfounded mien, and kept calling her half aloud at intervals, "Angel of heaven!–Angel of God!–Archangel!"–But the two female friends retired eagerly into a cabinet; and here Clotilda poured the first vulnerary water into the widely rent soul of the mother, by asseverating and pledging the intervention of a redeeming mystery, and concerting with her on that account the journey to London.–This withdrawal was partly also wrung from her by her false position with the Chamberlain's lady, whose last windlass-maker, together with all the levers of her sunken fortune, had now been buried with her husband; and who, as she threw all the blame upon Clotilda's conduct, sought still more to afflict this mourning spirit by an intentional exaggeration of her own mourning. As Lady Le Baut, for the rest, liked nothing so much as prayer-books and freethinkers, she now compensated for the latter with the former.

Some of my readers will already have darted on before me, and have peered into Victor's balcony to find his grief hidden within four walls;–frightfully stands the solitude before him, unfolding to him a great black picture, with two fresh graves. In one great grave lies lost friendship; in the other, lost hope. Ah! he wishes the third, in which he might also lose himself. He had the sublime mood of Hamlet. The darkened Julius appeared to him like a galvanically quivering dead man. He wholly avoided the court; for his self-regard was far too considerate and proud to keep up a fleeting pomp with a stolen nobility, and the surreptitious privileges of a lord's son. Moreover, a slight chilblain was raised on his heart by the thought that his Lordship, according to the degenerate way of all statesmen and state-machinists, of managing men only as bodies, not as spirits; only as caryatides, not as tenants of the state-edifice; in short, merely as dancing-girls of Golconda,^[169] who have their limbs yoked and tied together as a beast of burden to a single rider,–that his Lordship, I say, this otherwise exalted soul, had misused even his Victor too much as the tool of his virtue. But he forgave the man for it, whom, after all, he had nothing to reproach with, except that he had only the kindnesses of a father, without his rights.

As Victor no longer paid court to any one, naturally the Apothecary cared no more to pay it to him. The former smiled at that, and thought: "So should every good courtier act, and, like a clever ferryman, always leave that side of his boat which is sinking, and step over to the other." Zeusel stepped over to the favored Watering-place-doctor, Culpepper, to whose judgment they ascribed January's recovery, which was the effect of summer; and he prostrated himself to lick with his little snaky tongue the feet whose heels he had formerly stung with his poisonous bite. But churls never forgive; Culpepper despised the "ninety-nine per cent fellow,"^[170] and the "ninety-nine per cent fellow" again despised my court-physician, although, from fear,–as the Prince from love of ease,–he ventured not either to browbeat him or to turn him out of his house.

Poor Victor! the unhappy needs activity, as the happy needs repose; and yet thou wast compelled to look, with bound limbs, into the future, as into an approaching, distending storm.–Thou couldst neither suppress nor guide nor hasten it, and hadst not even the comfort of forging weapons for sorrow, and, like Samson, to express and–extinguish the convulsion of agony by shakings down of the pillars!–He could not even do anything for the imprisoned darling, whom he had plunged into a still greater anguish; for Flamin's sufferings brought back again into his bosom friendship for him, though disguised in the domino of philanthropy. He must wait to see; but he could not guess whether his Lordship was coming or was living,–neither of which suppositions, in consequence of his silence and of the non-appearance of the fifth princely son, had much in its favor.–At last he came to be afraid of sleep, especially the afternoon nap; for slumber lays, to be sure, its summer night over our present as over a future. It draws two eyelids like the first bandage over the wounds of man, and with a little dream covers over a battle-field; but when it departs again with its mantle, then do the hungry pangs pounce so much the more fiercely upon the naked man, amidst stings he starts up out of the more tranquil dream, and reason must begin over again the suspended cure, the forgotten consolation.–And yet–thou good Destiny!–thou didst still show our Victor a streak of evening-redness in his broad night-heaven; it was the hope of perhaps receiving from Clotilda, whom his heart no longer dared call his own, a letter from London....

I was going to close this chapter, first with the intelligence that the chapters come in, in ever-widening comprehensiveness of periods and lessenings of size,–which betokens the end of the story,–and afterward with the request that readers will not take it ill, if the personages therein play and speculate more and more romantically; misfortune makes romantic, not the biographer.

But I by no means conclude,–even on account of the last request,–but rather prefer to freshen a little in the mind of the reader the image of the old, joyous Victor, of whom he will hardly any longer be able to conceive. It is an uncommonly fortunate incident that the dog, on the third Dog-Post-Day, handed in one or two facts, which I at the time entirely omitted. For that reason I can now unexpectedly state them. It must certainly give me and the reader the greatest pleasure, when my picture–which was even at that time quite finished–is hung up here on this page.

The hiatus of the third chapter, wherein I paint Victor's arrival at the parsonage from GÖttingen, reads, when filled out, thus:–

"The Chaplain had the peculiarity of many people, that, in the midst of the choir of joys and visits, he thought on his most trifling employments; e. g., on the wedding day, of his mole-traps. To-day, in the servants' room,–while his Lordship was communicating his secret instruction to the Court-Physician,–he was cutting in halves seed-potatoes. There were few to whom he could intrust the cutting up of this fruit, because he knew how seldom a man possesses sufficient stereometry of the eye to split a potato into two equal conic sections or hemispheres. He would sooner have passed the seed-time than have divided a germinal globe into unequal sections; and he said, 'All I want is order.'–It may throw a shade over my hero, if it comes out,–and certainly it must through the press,–and especially if it reaches the ears of Nuremberg patricians and people in offices and membra of the supreme court, that Victor in the afternoon marched in state behind the Chaplain and Appel over the vegetable garden, and there executed what they call in some provinces planting potatoes. They gave him the credit, that he incorporated the subterranean bread-fruit in the ground at quite as symmetrical distances as the chaplain; in fact, both looked sharply after the rectitude of the potato-row, and their eyes were the parallel rulers of the beds. The Chaplain had already beforehand looked after and helped on the plough behind a dioptric rule or alidade, in order that the field about which I and the judicial membra are now standing might be cut up into equal prisms or beds. When at evening both came home with great gravity and little waistcoats, the whole house loved him so that they could have eaten him; and the Parson's wife asked him what he would have done in his waistcoat, if the Chamberlain's lady had met him; would he have made a bow or an apology, or done nothing?

"'O thou dear Germany!' (he cried and smote his hands together,) 'shall not then the whole country make a joke, except as the court decrees?' (Here Victor looked at the old, deaf coachman Zeusel; for every humorous effusion he regularly addressed to him who least understood it. I will here, however, have it addressed to the patricians and membra.) 'Is there, then, my dear man, nothing in the country but gallowses and carpenters and officers of justice, so that, I mean, the former cannot touch an axe, unless the latter have struck the first blow with it? Will you, then, get all follies, like fashions, from above downward, as a wind always roars in the upper regions of the atmosphere before it whistles down below at our windows?–And where, then, is there an imperial recess or a vicariate conclusion which forbids a German of the empire to play the fool? I hope, Zeusel, a time is yet to come when you and I and every one will have sense enough to have his own, and his own private folly, begotten of his flesh and blood, as Autodidact in all folly and wisdom.–O men, poor creatures! catch, I pray, at the wing and tail feathers of joy amidst the forced marches of your days! O ye poor creatures! will no good friend, then, scribble an imperial folio, and prove to you that, like the Devil in the Apocalypse, you have but a short time? Ah! enjoyment promises so little,–hope performs so little,–the mowing and planting days of joy stand in the Berlin Almanac so few in number,–if, now, you were absolutely so stupid as to put away and lay up whole hours and olympiads full of pleasure, like preserves in your cellar, in order, the Devil knows when, to come upon them as fifty or sixty entire pickled and salted years—I say, if you did not press out on the cluster of every hour the berry of each moment at least with some lemon-squeezers—what would come of it at last?... nothing but the moral to my first and last fable, which I once made in the presence of a Hanoverian.' ...

"I wish the reader wanted it; for it runs thus: 'The Stupid Marmot is the title. The said marmot was once led by the full crop of a pigeon, the contents of which he was eating, to the prize question, whether it would not be better, if, instead of single grains of corn, he should rather bring in pigeons with whole corn magazines in their throats. He did so. On a long summer day, he arrested half a flock of pigeons with full crops. He slit open not a single crop, however, but, though hungry, saved all up for evening and morning: first, in order to catch a goodly lot of pigeons; secondly, to feast on the batch of corn thoroughly softened in the evening. At last, when evening came, he ripped open the crops of his tithe-officers, six, nine, all,–not a grain was any longer there; the prisoners had already digested all themselves, and the marmot had been as stupid as a miser.'"

So far the Third and the Fortieth Dog-Post-Days.–Poor Victor!

Postscript.–The history stops now in the month of August, and the historian in the fore part of October,–only a month lies between the two.

barstart