The Invisible Lodge Part 3

SEVENTH SECTION.

Robisch.--The Starling.--A Lamb in the Place of the Above-Mentioned Cat.

After such an abduction they confined Gustavus's theatre and pleasure-ground strictly within the wall of the castle; into the waving grain-fields and the hamlet of Auenthal, which lay at about a seventeenth of a German mile distant, he could only look. This flowery mountain island he cruised round all day long, in order to knock down every red chafer, to twist off every marbled snail-house from its leaf, and generally to shut up everything that skipped about on six feet in the prison he had prepared for it. At the expense of his inexperienced fingers, he even undertook at first to pull the bee by the hinder part of the body out of its cup of joy. The motley prisoners he now crowded together (as princes do all cla.s.ses of men into one metropolis) into a beautiful Solomon's-temple, or into a silver-plated Noah's-ark of pasteboard, with more windows than walls. The architect of this fourth temple of Solomon was not, as with the first, the Devil or the Worm Lis,[14] but a human being, who could easily be likened to both, the so-called princely rat-catcher _Robisch_. This va.s.sal of the Captain visited annually the best chambers and gardens of the whole land, in order to cleanse both, not so much of their _worst_ as of their _least_ inmates--mice and moles. I will not exactly a.s.sure the learned Republic that this mouse-butcher dispatched as many subterranean moles out of the world as there are scribbling ones that annually come in, to set themselves on their hind feet and then with their fore feet, which in both kinds of moles resemble human hands, in the book stores and at the Leipsic trade-sale, throw up their mole-hills as little Parna.s.sus-mountains;--meanwhile, Robisch was paid exactly as if the chamber-hunter had cleared out all vermin. For the people thought, if one should provoke this cup-poisoner of the rodents, instead of paying him, he would imitate the miracles of Moses, and redouble, by colonies left behind him, the vermin which one took out of his royal and penal jurisdiction. I will take my hands off from this dirty soul, whose orbit, I hope, may never bring him nearer my Gustavus, when I have recorded that he was often in the house of the Falkenbergs; that, when there were strangers there, he acted as extra and occasional domestic, and when wild game, in the shape of recruits, was to be caught, as drawing-hound to the Captain, and that he pressed himself and his wares upon little Gustavus. Such a hooking-on to children, without parental childlikeness, is ambiguous. Children, however, have a special love for servants, and Gustavus particularly, who, indeed, could not, even at a later period, possibly hate any one whom he had loved in his childhood; all the misdeeds which Robisch might have committed against him could not have snapped asunder the bond of that grat.i.tude he felt for the gift of the miserable insect block-house which depopulated the wall.

Whatever lived and buzzed in the Solomon's-castle-church must be fed with sugar, because children look upon that as both lunch and dessert; and the finest inmates would have starved to death had not their overseer, Gustavus, received from the chamber-hunter, as a further present, a starling; for this starling he let hop into the Pantheon, and eat everything which itself had nothing to eat.... If I have here hid away under the wing-sheaths of the insects, and in the bill of the starling the most just reflections and the boldest hints, I hope the reader will cleverly find them there.

Except myself, no one, perhaps, had Gustavus's name in his bill so often as the starling, who, like court people, never had anything in his head but a _nomen proprium_. The little fellow thought the starling thought, and was a man as much as Robisch, and loved him for all he did; therefore, he could not be satisfied with listening to him and loving everything about him. In fact, there was nothing which he could love and hug enough. The farmer had for that purpose given him for a companion a black lamb, which he led and lured around the wall with a red ribbon and a crust of bread. The lamb, like a village comedian, had to play all parts. At one time he must be the Genius, then the poodle; now Gustavus and now Robisch. Thus did our little friend play solo his first earthly parts, and was at once manager, prompter, and theatre poet. Such comedies as children _make_ for themselves are a thousand times more profitable than those they _act_, even though they came out of Weisse's writing-desk; in our day, besides, when the whole man is a figurant, his virtue a dramatic part, and his sensibility lyric poetry, this wrenching of children's souls is particularly dangerous. However, this is also, sometimes, not true; for I, myself, acted the complete sharper, to be sure only once, twice, or thrice in my life, but that was even before I had gone to my first confession.

The decree which forbade his going down the castle hill, differed honorably from the decrees of our transcendant parents, the magistracy, in this respect, that it was, in the first place, made known to the party concerned, and, secondly, that it was maintained for at least a fortnight. Gustavus would have given his life to have taken himself and his lamb from the wall down to the foot of the mountain. Now, as the Captain knew, from Quistorp's Juridical Contributions, that one may subst.i.tute for close confinement within the walls, the larger one of gaol limits, or the bounds of the district, accordingly he dictated the latter punishment instead of the former, and said: "Can not one give the lamb in charge of the farmer's Regel (Regina), so long as she tends the flock on the hillside? So far as I am concerned, the youngster may join in driving, if I only have him always in sight." I must still wait to see what the Imperial Knighthood will say or write upon this, viz., that an honorary member thereof, my hero, at four o'clock in the afternoon regularly twisted off a long hazel wand, and therewith transformed himself into a young ox-driver, and by the side of Strossner's eleven-year-old Regina, drove out the sheep and cattle and the lamb led by the ribbon with such pride and such Jupiter's eyebrows, that any one could easily see he directed the whole stall, and challenged the imperial chivalry at this moment to come and see him.

Only in the Millenial Kingdom are there such afternoons as Gustavus enjoyed, as in the lap of the earth, on that eminence. My father should have sent me to a drawing school: could I not now have caught and mirrored the whole landscape in my stream of colors instead of a stream of ink? Verily, I could image before the eyes of the reader every bush with its bird gliding into it, every lip-colored strawberry of the rocky slope, every sheep with its new growth of down, and every tree around whose roots the squirrel had strewed his crumbled fir-cones.

Meanwhile there are, on the other hand, things at which the pole-cat hairs of the pencil brush in vain, but which flow beautifully from my quill--the eye of Gustavus swimming on the tide of pleasure, sails lightly to and fro between the lamb, the bright flowery ground with the shadow-formed spit of land and the enchanting face of Regina, and needs never to look away.

Why did I say "enchanting face," when it was only an every-day one?

Because my little Apollo and sheepherd with thirsty eyes flew to this face, as to a flower. In a brain like his, wherein all day long the white flame of fancy and no blue phlegmatic brandy-flame blazed up, it could not fail that every female face should shine with gilded charms in a divine color, and not in a hue of death. All beauties had with him the advantage, too, of having been seen, not for ten years, but within ten days. This, however, is not his first love, but only a morning-divine-service, a vigil eve, a Protevangelium of some first love or other--nothing more.

For two whole weeks he drove his lamb to pasture, before his courage rose so high that he could venture--not to seat himself beside her knitting (that exceeded his human powers), but--to hold fast his sheep to its _postillion d'amour_, not, however, to lead it to Regina, but to be drawn by it himself to her; for the best love is the most bashful, as the basest is the most bold. Then, like a tranquillizing moon, would her image, as she was more in his thoughts than in his sight, lay itself upon his dreaming soul, and so much was enough. His second contrivance for being her a.s.sessor (or by-sitter) was the round shadow of a linden-tree that waved lower down the hill, behind which, as behind a lattice, the evening sun was broken into splinters. With this shadow he now edged up nearer and nearer to Regina; under the pretext of shunning one sun, he drew nearer to another redder one. With such little trickeries love runs over; but they are all guessed and forgiven; and they are often prompted more by instinct than by conscious design. To be sure, when the evening slowly stretched upward from the valley to the heights--when drowsy nature, sinking to slumber, still, as if half in sleep, murmured a word or two in the broken tones of a bird that had gone to its nest--when the chime of bells on the necks of the herd, that plucked the innocent flowers of joy from the meadow, and the monotone of the cuckoo and the confused hum of dying day had pressed the keys of the lowest strings; then did his love and his courage grow wonderfully, and not seldom to such a pitch that he openly took out of his pocket the cake which he had kept for her, and, without scruple, laid it in the gra.s.s, in order actually to make her a tender of this pastry, so soon as they should have, in the twilight, to part from each other at the castle-gate: there he thrust the donation upon her with hurried confusion and darted away with joyful shame. If he succeeded in insinuating into her hand this evening offering, then was every pulse of his arterial system a rapturously beating heart (for the speech and joy of his love was _giving_), and under his bed-clothes he was all night planting bold plans for the morrow, which the afternoon bell-hammer with four blows killed utterly down to their very tap-roots. She always put on her mother's wide neckerchief; from this a philosopher of sense must infer that in after years the large neckerchiefs of the ladies pleased him, which I myself prefer to the former short ap.r.o.ns of the neck; on the same ground he, like myself, also liked broad head-bands and broad ap.r.o.ns. I have already played _L'Hombre_ with philosophers, who reversed the thing and a.s.serted that all this pleased him, not because the article was on the beauty (Regina), but because the beauty was in the article.

In fact, I am ashamed that, while the raggedest Baccalaurei dip their pens and portray to their fellow Baccalaurei the most elegant Sponsalia of Queens and Marchionesses, I meanwhile spend my writing materials on the sheep-tending and love-making of two children. Both occupations ran on into the autumn, and fain would I picture them; but, as I said, my shame before the Bachelors!--and yet how I envy thee, winsome dreamer, this white sunny side of thy life on thy mountain, and thy lamb and thy vision! And how gladly would I arrest the days that glide over thy head and load thy little lap with flowers, and bring them to a standstill, so that the funeral-train of the armed days should have to halt in the background, which may empty thy lap--let the gairish light into thy pleasure-grove--stab thy lamb--pay thy Regina the wages of a serving-maid!

But in October all go off to Unter-Scheerau; and the children do not even know, as yet, that there are such things as lips and kisses!

O weeks of the very first love! why do we despise you more than our later follies? Ah, on all your seven days, which in you look like seven minutes, we were innocent, unselfish and full of love. Beautiful weeks!

ye are b.u.t.terflies that have lived over from an unknown year[15] to flutter as heralds of our life's spring-time! Would that I could think of you as enthusiastically as once, of you, days when neither pleasure nor hope were checked by any limits! Thou poor son of humanity--when the tender, white mist of thy childhood which spreads its enchantment over all nature is gone, still thou dost remain long in thy sunlight, but the fallen mist creeps up again from below into the blue as a denser rain-cloud, and in the noon of youth thou standest under the lightnings and thunder-bolts of thy pa.s.sions!--and at evening thy rent heavens still rain on!

EIGHTH SECTION.

Departure for the City.--Woman's Whims.--Gashed Eyes.

As the n.o.bility and wood-rats inhabit the country in summer, and in winter the city, the Captain did so too; for the beauty of nature (he thought, and so did his lawyer) amounted at last to nothing more than an inventory of boors, whose elbows and thighs are cased half in ticking and half in st.i.tched leather, swampy grounds, fallow fields, and herds of swine, and that there is nothing there for the senses but stench; whereas in the city there is at least a bit of flesh to be had, a game of French cards, some real good fun and a human being or two. It is youthful intolerance to deny that a man who has no feeling for music or scenery, may still have some for other people's needs and honor, especially if that man is the Captain.

Much weightier reasons still drove him to Scheerau; he sought there 13,000 Rixdollars, a lot of recruits, and a tutor. The last first! His wife said: "Gustavus must have some one; he is still deficient in breeding!" But tutors are not wanting in that; these infants from the Alumneum, whom nothing raises but a pulpit staircase, who continue to be shepherds of the soul to the young n.o.blemen, till they become spiritual shepherds of the Church, which their pupil governs--these educational potters are able to shape and smooth not merely the mind of the young gentleman--as the father hopes--but his body also--as the mother hopes--right well; first, without any polish of their own; secondly, in study hours; thirdly, with words; fourthly, without women; fifthly, in a sixth way, this, namely, that the tutor compresses the broadest lion-heart into a sleepy badger's heart.

The second metallic spur which urged the Captain to the city was money.

No one could fall into the condition of being either a creditor or a debtor so easily as he; as he neither denied himself nor others anything; he had at last transformed half the neighborhood into his _guests_ and _debtors_; but now he would almost change himself into both, unless the Prince should build up again his dwindling money-pile.

He was obliged therefore to come to the residence-city of Ober-Scheerau with the disagreeable pet.i.tion that the aforesaid Prince would--not so much present or lend--that might have been practicable--but rather _pay_ 13,000 Rixdollars, as a capital of seven years standing. The Sufi of Scheerau had, namely, a habit of never dismissing a mistress without giving her a parting present of an estate, or a government, or a starred husband; he always left so much of a female favorite, that a marriageable wife might be made out of it for a marrying ninny; as the eagle and the lion (who are also Princes, of beasts) always leave a portion of their prey unconsumed for other creatures. Accordingly he divorced himself even from the mother of his natural son--Captain von Ottomar--on the knightly seat, _Ruhestadt_, which he, on one and the same day, bought and gave away (with Falkenberg's money.)

Thirdly, the Captain, by coming to Scheerau, would spare his under-officers, who were mostly stationed there, a step or two; for he could strike, indeed, with his cane as easily as a lady with her fan, but he would not willingly break the sixth leg of a gra.s.shopper, and therefore he spared the limbs of his people, who had four legs less, so much the more.

At last they are packing up, the Falkenberg family; we will look on. As the only time that Falkenberg's soul, like clocks and horses, did not stop was in traveling, on the morning of his journey he was in his most joyous and impetuous mood; wanted to go ahead not by _seconds_, but by _nones_; cursed all hands and feet in the castle for not flying; crammed and jammed the female trinkets and toggery with brazen hands into the nearest box; and had no other seton to draw off his impatient ennui than his feet, with which he stamped, and his hands, with which he partly thrashed the coachman for the same reason that he did the horses, and partly and handsomely, distributed presents to all that were left behind in the castle.

But the Captain's lady understood so well how to do all things in the most complete and judicious manner, that she was never done with anything. If she had had three jumps to take to get out of the way of the moon as it came dumping down to the earth, she would, before jumping have smoothed one more wrinkle out of the window curtain--if she had been ironing it would have been still worse. Like scholars, in addition to her professional or livelihood-study, she devotes herself to an extra-study and by-work and does, in connection with every piece of work, those that lie adjacent to it. "Once for all, I cannot be so slovenly as other women," she has just been saying to her gnashing husband, who looked upon her for eight dumb minutes. "I would rather, in the devil's name, you were the most slovenly in the whole feudal n.o.bility," he replied. Now as she, whenever she was overtaken by a storm and injustice, merely anch.o.r.ed to the angry hyperboles of the party, as I, in the capacity of appellant advocate must frequently do, so too, on this occasion, she cleverly proved that slovenly women did not amount to much--and as there is nothing which still more excites a heated Captain like a haughty proof of what he does not in the least deny; so now, as always, things went on from worse to worse; the war-flails of the tongue were set in motion, his saliva-glands, her lachrymal-glands, and the livers of both parties with their gall-bladders secreted as much as must needs be secreted in Christian connubial colloquies,--but fifteen minutes and fifteen packings absorbed again like blood-veins all these connubial secretions. In starting on a journey no mortal has time to be angry. She was, upon my honor, a right good wife, only not at all times, _e. g_., least of all in setting out on a journey: she wanted, in the first place, to stay at home, and scolded at everything that had ears; secondly, she wanted to go. Never, when her husband in the morning put on his own cravat and his dog's, to make visits, did she desire to go too (unless indeed she had foreseen the absolute impossibility of going with them), but if, on the second day after, he happened to drop a word about a lady he had met there, then she would bewail her distress in his ears: "One of us cannot, the whole summer long, get a whiff of air out of the house."

If, the next time he would constrain her to accompany him, then there was a frightful deal to do; there was bleaching, weeding, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up meat-chests and napkin-presses, washing-bills, and everything to attend to, or this pretext: "I prefer to stay with my little ones." But her aim, which few guessed, was merely to be in two places at once, in the house and out of it, and it is unfortunate for our wives, if our philosophers and husbands have not as much insight as the Catholic philosophers and husbands the Combrian, Ariaga, Beka.n.u.s had long ago,[16] who perceived that the same body could easily at the same second not only sit, speak, grow in two or more places at once, but could even feel in one city and think in another,--at one and the same moment laugh in the church and weep in the theatre.

EXTRA-LEAF.

Are Women Female Popes?

All the questions in this paper I once put to an Abbess, who cared more to make money than saints. Is not the triple crown of the Pope now on female heads, as a four or five-fold one, and do not their hats shoot up into the air like lettuce-heads in dog-days?--Is it not well known to women themselves that they are as infallible as the Pope, and if he, as the Jansenists believe, is more so in dogmatic than in historical matters, is not with the female Popes the reverse true? And who has the courage to contradict one, unless he has married her? The Pope is G.o.d's vicegerent or, in fact, G.o.d himself, if Felius[17] is to be credited; but are not the Papesses notoriously G.o.ddesses? Certainly a Pope, Clement VI. himself says, that he can command angels to transport any church out of Purgatory into Heaven[18]; but do our female Popes need angels for that? They require only a week to cast us into Purgatory, and only an hour to s.n.a.t.c.h us out of it into Heaven. Maria.n.u.s Socinus, who a.s.serts[19] that a Pope can make something out of nothing, right out of wrong, and anything under heaven out of anything under heaven, must simply not think of doubting that our Papesses also have the same power, and do not their auricular confessions recur to is recollection?

Who excommunicate their heretics or give dispensations to their faithful oftener. Popes or Papesses? and who, at this day, most serene Abbess! makes more omnipotent eye-briefs and lip-bulls, who creates more saints, more blessed ones and more _Nuncios a and de latere_, Peter's successors or Peter's successoresses? Popes are said formerly to have given away or taken away kingdoms; what then? Do not Papesses rule those Kingdoms? Popes could not bestow upon America anything except a name, but is not that which some Papesses bring us from that land something much more _real_? Kings who once were tormented by Popes, are now blessed by Papesses; and if the former at most created a King or two, are not the Kings under most of the European throne canopies made by Papesses, and in fact, in neat pocket-form, until they gradually grow up from the baptismal font to be as tall as I or their throne? Do we not kiss their slippers oftener than that of the Holy Father, since their two arms were found by Professor Moskati at Padua long ago to be two fore-feet, to whose kid or silk shoes (hand-shoes) we every week press our lips? Do not Pope and Papess lay aside their old names, when they ascend the throne, which the one claims on the ground of age, the other on that of youth? And if it were true, that Pope and Papess were originally only bishops of a Province (a husband) and that there has never been any other female Pope than the good Joan; could I venture to say the exact opposite publicly in an extra-leaf or privately in your ear, most serene Abbess?

_End of the Extra-Leaf_.

CONTINUATION OF THE FOREGOING SECTION.

While I was questioning the Abbess, my attention was drawn away from the extravagantly whimsical Captain's lady. I will suppose that I or the reader had married her; then we should certainly have thanked heaven that we had screwed our brilliant ring on her ring-finger; and yet, as one sees, we should have had every day to have a tussle with her; so true it remains, that not the vices, but the whims of women strew so much horse-dust and so many thorns in the nuptial couch, that oftentimes Satan would be glad to lie there.

But for Gustavus, who carried so much, we should not have got out of the Castle ten minutes ago. My reader pictures him to himself, quite contrary to my expectation, and very falsely, namely, as being sad, because he has quitted the earthly cradle of his childhood, his garden of Adam and his evening mountain. How false! Another reader would imagine him full of joy, because with children, to whom every change of scene presents a new one, journeying is the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, and because the fancies of a child are not as yet gloomy ones. Scheerau must have seemed to his antic.i.p.ation nothing less than the city with long houses, wherein he had played with his sister.

Besides--which is a naturalization-act to all children--his play-house had been put on board; even the starling, who, as an agitated hierarch, sprang up and down in the Solomon's-Chapel-of-Ease, he held in his jouncing lap. He pitied every corner of the Castle with all that was in it, that it could not take pa.s.sage with him; this whole sh.e.l.l of a house seemed to him so narrow, so worn out, so faded out! People who have traveled little look upon their familiar home at the moment of departure, at that of arrival, and at other times, with three different feelings; but for migrating locusts and birds of pa.s.sage the high roads and city streets are only the corridors between the apartments.

Half an hour before starting he seated himself on the empty coach-box, with his legs wedged in among the baggage and in palpitating expectation of the moment when the horses should make their first leap.

At last the carriage door was shut to and all rolled away, down the mountain, across the common, on which the white, peeled tree that was once more to be planted in the earth with red-painted flag and ribbon streamers for the church-wake, grew quite despicable in the eyes of Gustavus, who was just going to meet in Scheerau a hundred finer May-poles and church fairs. But as he pa.s.sed along by the _fruitful region_ of his mountain, where such a harvest of joys had ripened for him: Ah, then, from the funeral pile of dead afternoons, from the tinkling herd that grazed on the summits, from an a.s.sociate herd boy with whom he had been no great friends, from the stone-built pen in which he had folded his lamb, that now stood up there without a ribbon and without any one to love him, and, finally, from the boundary-stone, on which once his sweetheart, his beauty, sat knitting--from all this, of course he turned his eyes away slowly, with many a long-lingering backward glance. "Ah!" he thought, "who will give thee citron-cakes and my little lamb crusts of bread? But I will send you over every day ever so many things!"

It was a pure October morning, the mist lay folded up at the feet of the heavens, the migrating summer still hovered with its blue pinions high over the foliage and the flowers which had brought it, and gazed with its broad and quietly warming sunny eye upon man, to whom it was bidding farewell. Gustavus would fain get out of the carriage, in order to wrap up the dew-sprinkled, fleeing summer, which, delicately woven, overspread the earth like a human life, and take it along with him. But thou, man! how often dost thou hang down over nature as a pestilential and mephitic vapor!

For they could hardly have gone on a league, after which he already began to take every village for Scheerau.... But I will first indicate where it was. At Yssig he screamed out in the wood: "O now the black arm yonder will reach in and take me out!" While the old man was still wondering how the little one knew that a finger-post was coming, which now actually pointed out from among the trees, all at once in behind there a voice began to scream: "Oh! my eyes! my eyes!" The child and the mother were petrified with terror; but the Captain leaped out from or through the carriage, smashed the gla.s.ses and bounded into the wood--and right upon a beautiful kneeling child, from whose lacerated eyes ran tears and water. "Oh, don't do anything to me, I can never see any more!" he said, and groped about him with his hands, in order to strike away the lancet which lay at his knees. "Who has done this?"

said the Captain, with the softest voice, that broke with intense compa.s.sion; but ere the child spoke, an old haggard beggar-woman approached and said a beggar had darted into the thicket, who would fain have blinded the child, in order to beg with it. But the child clung with increasing convulsions to his hand, and said: "Oh, she will cut me again!" The Captain guessed the knavery, broke off the nearest branch, switched at the wretched woman's face with a rage that missed its aim, and ran with the blind boy in his arms to the affrighted carriage. It was a heart-rending spectacle, the innocent worm, with fine features and movements, in rags, and with red and wrinkled eyes!

NINTH SECTION.

Viscera Without Body.--Scheerau.

Not merely liars and L'Hombre players, but romance readers also, must have a good memory to learn by heart the first ten or twelve sections, as if they were declensions and conjugations, because without these they cannot get on in the exposition. With me no stroke is in vain; in my book and in my body there hang bits of spleen; but the use of this inward part will very soon be brought out. Since a romance writer, like a courtier, aims at one sole object, namely, to ruin his friend and hero and lead him into heavily charged tempests, accordingly, I, too, have been for the last quarter building up, here a gray cloud that vanishes, there one that melts away; but when at last I have irresistibly charged with electricity all cells of the horizon, then I compress the whole devil into a thunder-storm--after fourteen sheets have been struck off, the compositor can already hear and set up the crash.... At bottom, to be sure, there is not a word of truth in it all; but as other authors are fond of giving out their romances for biographies, the privilege will be granted me of sometimes divesting my biography of the appearance of a romance.

The child, instead of his history, gave mere lamentations over his history. He seemed over seven years old, spoke German with an Italian accent, and his sickly, delicate, and pale-red body enwrapped his soul as a pale rose-leaf does the worm within it. His father was named Doctor Zoppo, came from Pavia, botanized himself from Italy to Germany, and let the little ones tear yellow flowers along the way. The blind Amandus wanted to pluck in this wood herbs also, but the devilish she-oculist happened upon him, helped him find yellow flowers and lured him with them so far into the woods that she could rob him of his clothes and his eyes.

Gustavus kept asking him every minute whether he could not see yet, gave him his luncheon that he might leave off weeping, and could not, as _his_ eyes were so widely open, comprehend his blindness. In the next country town Falkenberg got himself shaved and Amandus bandaged.

I once saw at the last station before Leipsic such a charming traverse-band over the eye and forehead of a maiden, that I wished my wife might from time to time have a slight cut in that region, because it has a very neat effect; contrariwise the bandage over Amandus's two eyes made him look a child of woe.

When Amandus, in better clothing and with the sad bandage, sat in the carriage, Gustavus could not possibly cease weeping, and would fain get out his starling and present it to him; for sympathy is determined not by the size but by the shape of suffering.

Few persons who journey to Scheerau, will have the absurd fortune to meet suddenly, two leagues before arriving, a solitary carriage without the occupant appertaining to it; Falkenberg and his people and horses had this luck. This carriage was bearing the stomach, the thick and thin intestines, the liver, wherein princes seethe their gall, the lungs, whose air-bladders are the princely gall-bladders, as the wind-pipe is the gall-pa.s.sage to the same, and the heart; but no corpse came with them; for the corpse, which was the reigning Lord of Scheerau, already lay in the hereditary vault. This stomach digested as much as his conscience did, namely, whole hides of land; and better than his thin head, to which truths and grievances (gravamina) were a heavy food; the Papinian stomach-machine remained even in advanced age still fiery, as indeed all else about him was childish. He used to ride for hours, a short time before his death, on a chamberlain, to whom he took a considerable liking; nevertheless, as a thoroughly sensible man, he thrust aside platter and gla.s.s, when the old and right contents no longer remained in either. Behind the sarcophagus of the intestines--the relic casket of the abdomen--rode the chief steward of the kitchen, several a.s.sistant cooks, the adjunct of the waiting service, and still greater members of the court establishment, _e. g_., the Medical Counsellor _Fenk_. He and Falkenberg did not observe each other. The latter was engrossed to-day with mere vanities: the Doctor, whom he sought in Italy, and the Prince, whom he still expected to find on the earth. The insolvent crowned entrails, which, in this way, could not pay money, involved him now in a financial litigation with the heir to the crown.