Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Part 14

The stomach of his inner man evinced a wonderful disrelish, and exhibited a reversed peristaltic motion towards everything in the shape of p.a.w.ning, 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 surpa.s.ses 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, Siebenkaes 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 b.u.t.ton. 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 Ans.p.a.ch 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 pa.s.sing. He himself was taken by surprise at this alarm of his; he would have expected anything else but alarm under the circ.u.mstances. 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 a.s.sume that every reader who has had as much as half a ship's pound weight of legal doc.u.ments through his hands--or one single settlement of law accounts--would take it for granted, as a matter of course, that the first pet.i.tion 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 pet.i.tions for delay with which he is overwhelmed, leaves him little time to write anything else. People ought to notice that these pet.i.tions for delay tend, as all other pet.i.tions do, to the protracting of the suit, just as all the wheels of a watch work together to r.e.t.a.r.d the princ.i.p.al 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 s.n.a.t.c.h, from his grasp a favourable judgment (a sort of thing as to which n.o.body 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 doc.u.ments, &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 G.o.d?"

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 Siebenkaes 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. Siebenkaes 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-ta.s.sel, 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 Siebenkaes'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 Jagers. 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 advent.i.tious 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.

Siebenkaes 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 Jager; 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 cha.s.se_, 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 l.u.s.tre, 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 n.o.body 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 st.i.tched, on his knee, the three-quarter boots down to half-boots, and soled them with the--leather arm, of which enough has been said already.

CHAPTER VII.

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

There is nothing which so much inconveniences me, or is so much to the prejudice of this story (so beautiful in itself), as the fact that I hare made a resolution to restrict it within the compa.s.s of four alphabets. I have thus, by my own act, deprived myself of everything in the shape of room for digressions. I find myself, metaphorically, in a somewhat similar position to one which I once found myself in, without metaphor, on an occasion when I was measuring the diameter and circ.u.mference of the town of Hof. On that occasion I had fastened a Catel's pedometer by a hook to the waistband of my trousers and the silken cord which runs down the thigh to a curved hook of steel at my knee, so that the three indexes on one dial (of which the first marks a hundred steps, the second a thousand, and the third up to twenty thousand) were all moving just as I moved myself. At this moment I met a young lady, whom it was inc.u.mbent on me that I should see home. I begged her to excuse me, as I had a Catel's pedometer on, and had already made a certain number of steps towards my measurement of the diameter of Hof. "You see, in a moment," I said, "how I am situated.

The pedometer, like a species of conscience, records all the steps I take; and, with a lady, I shall be obliged to take shorter steps, besides thousands of sideway and backward steps, all of which the pedometer will put to the account of the diameter. So, you see, I am afraid it's quite impossible that I _can_ have the pleasure of----"

However, this only made her the more determined that I _should_, and I was well laughed at; but I screwed myself to the spot, and wouldn't stir. At last I said I would go home with her, pedometer and all, if she would just read off my indexes for me (seeing I couldn't twist myself down low enough to see the dial)--read them off for me twice--firstly, then and there, and secondly, when we got to her house--so that I might deduct the steps taken by me in this young lady's company from the size of Hof. This agreement was honestly kept; and this little account of the occurrence may be of service to me some day if ever I publish (as I have not given up all hopes of doing) my perspective sketch of the town of Hof; and townspeople who saw me walking with the said young lady, and with the pedometer trailing at my knee, might cast it in my teeth and say it was a lame affair, and that n.o.body could calculate as to the steps he might take in a lady's company, far less apply them to the measurement of a town.

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

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

At length the long thread of riflemen, rolled up like a ball, began to unwind itself, and the waving line, like a great serpent, moved off in surging convolutions to the sound of trumpets and drums. A banner represented the serpent's crest, and the standard-bearer's coat was like a second flag beneath the other. The town-soldiery, more remarkable for quality than for quant.i.ty, shot the mottled line of compet.i.tors at intervals with the white of their uniforms. The auctioneering hairdresser--the only member of the lower ten thousand who rejoiced in a powdered head--tripped along, keeping the white peak of his cap at the due degree of distance from the leather pigtails of the aristocracy, which he had that morning tied and powdered. The mult.i.tude felt what a lofty position in this world really was, when, with bent heads, they raised their eyes to Heimlicher von Blaise, the director of the compet.i.tion, who accompanied the procession in his capacity of aorta of the whole arterial system, or elementary fire of all these ignes-fatui--or, in a word, as master of the shooters' lodge.

Happy was the wife who peeped out and saw her husband marching past in the procession--happy was Lenette, for her husband was there, and looked gallantly up as he pa.s.sed by. His short boots looked very nice, indeed; they were made both in the old fashion and in the new, and, like man, had put on the new (short) Adam over the old one.

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

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

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

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

However, although those who occupied themselves with the "swing"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I believe it is often from all these causes combined.