On the 9th of May, 1793, about three in the morning, there came a sharp peal of trumpets, like a light-beam, through the dim-red May-dawn; two twisted horns, with a straight trumpet between them, like a note of admiration between interrogation-points, were clanging from a house in which only a parishioner (not the Parson) dwelt and blew; for this parishioner had last night been celebrating the same ceremony which the pastor had this day before him. The joyful tallyho raised our Parson from his broad bed (and the Shock from beneath it, who some weeks ago had been exiled from the white, sleek coverlet), and this so early, that in the portraying tester, where on every former morning he had observed his ruddy visage, and his white bedclothes, all was at present dim and crayoned.
I confess, the new-painted room, and a gleam of dawn on the wall, made it so light, that he could see his knee-buckles glancing on the chair.
He then softly awakened his mother (the other guests were to lie for hours in the sheets), and she had the city cook-maid to awaken, who, like several other articles of wedding-furniture, had been borrowed for a day or two from Flachsenfingen. At two doors he knocked in vain, and without answer; for all were already down at the hearth, cooking, blowing; and arranging.
How softly does the Spring day gradually fold back its nun-veil, and the Earth grow bright, as if it were the morning of a Resurrection!--The quicksilver-pillar of the barometer, the guiding Fire-pillar of the weather-prophet, rests firmly on Fixlein"s Ark of the Covenant. The Sun raises himself, pure and cool, into the morning-blue, instead of into the morning-red. Swallows, instead of clouds, shoot skimming through the melodious air ... O, the good Genius of Fair Weather, who deserves many temples and festivals (because without him no festival could be held), lifted an ethereal, azure Day, as it were, from the well-clear atmosphere of the Moon, and sent it down, on blue b.u.t.terfly-wings,--as if it were a _blue_ Monday,--glittering below the Sun, in the zigzag of joyful, quivering descent, upon the narrow spot of Earth, which our heated fancies are now viewing .... And on this balmy, vernal spot stand, amid flowers, over which the trees are shaking blossoms instead of leaves, a bride and a bridegroom.... Happy Fixlein! how shall I paint thee without deepening the sighs of longing in the fairest souls?
But soft! we will not drink the magic cup of Fancy to the bottom at six in the morning; but keep sober till towards night!
At the sound of the morning prayer-bell, the bridegroom, for the din of preparation was disturbing his quiet orison, went out into the churchyard, which (as in many other places), together with the church, lay round his mansion like a court. Here on the moist green, over whose closed flowers the churchyard wall was still spreading broad shadows, did his spirit cool itself from the warm dreams of Earth; here, where the white flat gravestone of his Teacher lay before him like the fallen-in door on the Ja.n.u.s"s-temple of Life, or like the windward side of the narrow house, turned towards the tempests of the world; here, where the little shrunk metallic door on the grated cross of his father uttered to him the inscriptions of death, and the year when his parent departed, and all the admonitions and mementos, graven on the lead;--there, I say, his mood grew softer and more solemn; and he now lifted up by heart his morning prayer, which usually he read; and entreated G.o.d to bless him in his office, and to spare his mother"s life, and to look with favor and acceptance on the purpose of to-day.
Then over the graves he walked into his fenceless little angular flower-garden; and here, composed and confident in the Divine keeping, he pressed the stalks of his tulips deeper into the mellow earth.
But on returning to the house, he was met on all hands by the bell-ringing and the Janizary-music of wedding-gladness;--the marriage-guests had all thrown off their nightcaps, and were drinking diligently;--there was a clattering, a cooking, a frizzling;--tea-services, coffee-services, and warm beer-services, were advancing in succession; and plates full of bride-cakes were going round like potters" frames or cistern-wheels.--The Schoolmaster, with three young lads, was heard rehearsing from his own house an _Arioso_, with which, so soon as they were perfect, he purposed to surprise his clerical superior.--But now rushed all the arms of the foaming joy-streams into one, when the sky-queen besprinkled with blossoms, the bride, descended upon Earth in her timid joy, full of quivering, humble love;--when the bells began;--when the procession-column set forth with the whole village round and before it;--when the organ, the congregation, the officiating priest, and the sparrows on the trees of the church-window, struck louder and louder their rolling peals on the drum of the jubilee-festival.... The heart of the singing bridegroom was like to leap from its place for joy, "that on his bridal-day it was all so respectable and grand."--Not till the marriage benediction could he pray a little.
Still worse and louder grew the business during dinner, when pastry-work and marchpane-devices were brought forward,--when gla.s.ses and slain fishes (laid under the napkins to frighten the guests) went round;--and when the guests rose, and themselves went round, and at length danced round; for they had instrumental music from the city there.
One minute handed over to the other the sugar-bowl and bottle-case of joy; the guests heard and saw less and less, and the villagers began to see and hear more and more, and towards night they penetrated like a wedge into the open door,--nay, two youths ventured even, in the middle of the parsonage-court, to mount a plank over a beam, and commence seesawing. Out of doors, the gleaming vapor of the departed Sun was encircling the Earth, the evening star was glittering over parsonage and churchyard; no one heeded it.
However, about nine o"clock,--when the marriage-guests had wellnigh forgotten the marriage-pair, and were drinking or dancing along for their own behoof; when poor mortals, in this sunshine of Fate, like fishes in the sunshine of the sky, were leaping up from their wet, cold element; and when the bridegroom, under the star of happiness and love, casting like a comet its long train of radiance over all his heaven, had in secret pressed to his joy-filled breast his bride and his mother,--then did he lock a slice of wedding-bread privily into a press, in the old superst.i.tious belief, that this residue secured continuance of bread for the whole marriage. As he returned, with greater love for the sole partner of his life, she herself met him with his mother, to deliver him in private the bridal-nightgown and bridal-shirt, as is the ancient usage. Many a countenance grows pale in violent emotions, even of joy; Thiennette"s wax-face was bleaching still whiter under the sunbeams of Happiness. O never fall, thou lily of Heaven, and may four springs instead of four seasons open and shut thy flower-bells to the sun! All the arms of his soul as he floated on the sea of joy were quivering to clasp the soft, warm heart of his beloved, to encircle it gently and fast, and draw it to his own....
He led her from the crowded dancing-room into the cool evening. Why does the evening, does the night, put warmer love in our hearts? Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness; or is it the exalting separation from the turmoil of life; that veiling of the world, in which for the soul nothing more remains but souls;--is it therefore, that the letters in which the loved name stands written on our spirit appear, like phosphorus-writing, by night _in fire_, while by day in their _cloudy_ traces they but smoke?
He walked with his bride into the Castle-garden; she hastened quickly through the castle, and past its servants"-hall, where the fair flowers of her young life had been crushed broad and dry, under a long, dreary pressure; and her soul expanded, and breathed in the free open garden, on whose flowery soil destiny had cast forth the first seeds of the blossoms which to-day were gladdening her existence. Still Eden! Green flower-checkered _chiaroscuro_!--The moon is sleeping under ground like a dead one; but beyond the garden the sun"s red evening-clouds have fallen down like rose-leaves; and the evening-star, the brideman of the sun, hovers, like a glancing b.u.t.terfly, above the rosy red, and, modest as a bride, deprives no single starlet of its light.
The wandering pair arrived at the old gardener"s hut; now standing locked and dumb, with dark windows in the light garden, like a fragment of the Past surviving in the Present. Bared twigs of trees were folding, with clammy, half-formed leaves, over the thick, intertwisted tangles of the bushes.--The Spring was standing, like a conqueror, with Winter at his feet.--In the blue pond, now bloodless, a dusky evening-sky lay hollowed out, and the gushing waters were moistening the flower-beds.--The silver sparks of stars were rising on the altar of the East, and falling down extinguished in the red sea of the West.
The wind whirred, like a night-bird, louder through the trees; and gave tones to the acacia-grove, and the tones called to the pair who had first become happy within it: "Enter, new mortal pair, and think of what is past, and of my withering and your own; and be holy as Eternity, and weep not only for joy, but for grat.i.tude also!"--And the wet-eyed bridegroom led his wet-eyed bride under the blossoms, and laid his soul, like a flower, on her heart, and said: "Best Thiennette, I am unspeakably happy, and would say much, and cannot.--Ah, thou Dearest, we will live like angels, like children together! Surely I will do all that is good to thee; two years ago I had nothing, no nothing; ah, it is through thee, best love, that I am happy. I call thee Thou, now, thou dear good soul!" She drew him closer to her, and said, though without kissing him: "Call me Thou always, Dearest!"
And as they stept forth again from the sacred grove into the magic-dusky garden, he took off his hat; first, that he might internally thank G.o.d, and secondly, because he wished to look into this fairest evening sky.
They reached the blazing, rustling marriage-house, but their softened hearts sought stillness; and a foreign touch, as in the blossoming vine, would have disturbed the flower-nuptials of their souls. They turned rather, and winded up into the churchyard to preserve their mood. Majestic on the groves and mountains stood the Night before man"s heart, and made it also great. Over the _white_ steeple-obelisk the sky rested _bluer_ and _darker_; and behind it wavered the withered summit of the May-pole with faded flag. The son noticed his father"s grave, on which the wind was opening and shutting, with harsh noise, the little door of the metal cross, to let the year of his death be read on the bra.s.s plate within. An overpowering sadness seized his heart with violent streams of tears, and drove him to the sunk hillock, and he led his bride to the grave, and said: "Here sleeps he, my good father; in his thirty-second year he was carried hither to his long rest. O Thou good, dear father, couldst thou to-day but see the happiness of thy son, like my mother! But thy eyes are empty, and thy breast is full of ashes, and thou seest us not."--He was silent. The bride wept aloud; she saw the mouldering coffins of her parents open, and the two dead arise and look round for their daughter, who had stayed so long behind them, forsaken on the Earth. She fell upon his heart, and faltered: "O beloved, I have neither father nor mother; do not forsake me!"
O thou who hast still a father and a mother, thank G.o.d for it, on the day when thy soul is full of joyful tears, and needs a bosom wherein to shed them....
And with this embracing at a father"s grave, let this day of joy be holily concluded.--
TENTH LETTER-BOX.
St. Thomas"s-Day and Birthday.
An Author is a sort of bee-keeper for his reader-swarm; in whose behalf he separates the Flora kept for their use into different seasons, and here accelerates, and there r.e.t.a.r.ds, the blossoming of many a flower, that so in all chapters there be blooming.
The G.o.ddess of Love and the angel of Peace conducted our married pair on tracks running over full meadows, through the Spring; and on footpaths hidden by high corn-fields, through the Summer; and Autumn, as they advanced towards Winter, spread her marble leaves under their feet. And thus they arrived before the low, dark gate of Winter, full of life, full of love, trustful, contented, sound, and ruddy.
On St. Thomas"s-day was Thiennette"s birthday as well as Winter"s.
About a quarter past nine, just when the singing ceases in the church, we shall take a peep through the window into the interior of the parsonage. There is nothing here but the old mother, who has all day (the son having restricted her to rest, and not work) been gliding about, and brushing, and burnishing, and scouring, and wiping; every carved chair-leg, and every bra.s.s nail of the waxcloth-covered table, she has polished into brightness;--everything hangs, as with all married people who have no children, in its right place, brushes, fly-flaps, and almanacs;--the chairs are stationed by the room-police in their ancient corners;--a flax-rock, encircled with a diadem, or scarf of azure riband, is lying in the Schadeck-bed, because, though it is a half-holiday, some spinning may go on;--the narrow slips of paper, whereon heads of sermons are to be arranged, lie white beside the sermons themselves, that is, beside the octavo paper-book which holds them, for the Parson and his work-table, by reason of the cold, have migrated from the study to the sitting-room;--his large furred doublet is hanging beside his clean bridegroom-nightgown; there is nothing wanting in the room but He and She. For he had preached her with him to-night into the empty Apostle"s-day church, that so her mother, without witnesses,--except the two or three thousand readers who are peeping with me through the window,--might arrange the provender-baking, and whole commissariat department of the birthday-festival, and spread out her best table-gear and victual-stores without obstruction.
The soul-curer reckoned it no sin to admonish, and exhort, and encourage, and threaten his parishioners, till he felt pretty certain that the soup must be smoking on the plates. Then he led his birthday helpmate home, and suddenly placed her before the altar of meat-offering, before a sweet t.i.tle-page of bread-tart, on which her name stood baked, in true _monastic characters_, in tooth-letters of almonds. In the background of time and of the room, I yet conceal two--bottles of Pontac. How quickly, under the sunshine of joy, do thy cheeks grow ripe, Thiennette, when thy husband solemnly says: "This is thy birthday; and may the Lord bless thee, and watch over thee, and cause his countenance to shine on thee, and send thee, to the joy of our mother and thy husband especially, a happy, glad _recovery_.
Amen!"--And when Thiennette perceived that it was the old mistress who had cooked and served up all this herself, she fell upon her neck, as if it had been not her husband"s mother, but her own.
Emotion conquers the appet.i.te. But Fixlein"s stomach was as strong as his heart; and with him no species of movement could subdue the peristaltic. Drink is the friction-oil of the tongue, as eating is its drag. Yet, not till he had eaten and spoken much, did the pastor fill the gla.s.ses. Then indeed he drew the corksluice from the bottle, and set forth its streams. The sickly mother, of a being still hid beneath her heart, turned her eyes, in embarra.s.sed emotion, on the old woman only; and could scarcely chide him for sending to the city wine-merchant on her account. He took a gla.s.s in each hand, for each of the two whom he loved, and handed them to his mother and his wife, and said: "To thy long, long life, Thiennette!--And your health and happiness, Mamma!--And a glad arrival to our little one, if G.o.d so bless us!" "My son," said the gardeneress, "it is to thy long life that we must drink; for it is by thee we are supported. G.o.d grant thee length of days!" added she, with stifled voice, and her eyes betrayed her tears.
I nowhere find a livelier emblem of the female s.e.x, in all its boundless levity, than in the case where a woman is carrying the angel of Death beneath her heart, and yet in these nine months full of mortal tokens thinks of nothing more important than of who shall be the gossips, and what shall be cooked at the christening. But thou, Thiennette, hadst n.o.bler thoughts, though these too along with them.
The still hidden darling of thy heart was resting before thy eyes like a little angel sculptured on a gravestone, and pointing with its small finger to the hour when thou shouldst die; and every morning and every evening thou thoughtest of death with a certainty of which I yet knew not the reasons; and to thee it was as if the Earth were a dark mineral cave, where man"s blood, like stalact.i.tic water, drops down, and in dropping raises shapes which gleam so transiently, and so quickly fade away! And that was the cause why tears were continually trickling from thy soft eyes, and betraying all thy anxious thoughts about thy child; but thou repaidst these sad effusions of thy heart by the embrace in which, with new-awakened love, thou fellest on thy husband"s neck, and saidst: "Be as it may, G.o.d"s will be done, so thou and my child are left alive!--But I know well that thou, Dearest, lovest me as I do thee." ... Lay thy hand, good mother, full of blessings, on the two; and thou, kind Fate, never lift thine away from them!--
It is with emotion and good wishes that I witness the kiss of two fair friends, or the embracing of two virtuous lovers; and from the fire of their altar sparks fly over to me; but what is this to our sympathetic exaltation when we see two mortals, bending under the same burden, bound to the same duties, animated to the same care for the same little darlings, fall on one another"s overflowing hearts, in some fair hour?
And if these, moreover, are two mortals who already wear the mourning weeds of life, I mean old age, whose hair and cheeks are now grown colorless, and eyes grown dim, and whose faces a thousand thorns have marred into images of Sorrow;--when these two clasp each other with such wearied, aged arms, and so near to the precipice of the grave, and when they say or think: "All in us is dead, but not our love--O we have lived and suffered long together, and now we will hold out our hands to Death together also, and let him carry us away together,"--does not all within us cry: O Love, thy spark is superior to Time; it burns neither in joy nor in the cheek of roses; it dies not, neither under a thousand tears nor under the snow of old age, nor under the ashes of thy--beloved. It never dies; and Thou, All-good! if there were no eternal love, there were no love at all....
To the Parson it was easier than it is to me to pave for himself a transition from the heart to the digestive faculty. He now submitted to Thiennette (whose voice at once grew cheerful, while her eyes time after time began to sparkle) his purpose to take advantage of the frosty weather and have the winter meat slaughtered and salted. "The pig can scarcely rise," said he; and forthwith he fixed the determination of the women, further the butcher, and the day, and all _et ceteras_; appointing everything with a degree of punctuality, such as the war-college (when it applies the cupping-gla.s.s, the battle-sword, to the overfull system of mankind) exhibits on the previous day, in its arrangements, before it drives a province into the baiting-ring and slaughter-house.
This settled, he began to talk and feel quite joyously about the course of winter, which had commenced to-day at two-and-twenty minutes past eight in the morning; "for," said he, "new-year is close at hand; and we shall not need so much candle to-morrow night as to-night." His mother, it is true, came athwart him with the weapons of her five senses; but he fronted her with his Astronomical Tables, and proved that the lengthening of the day was no less undeniable than imperceptible. In the last place, like most official and married persons, heeding little whether his women took him or not, he informed them, in juristico-theological phrase: "That he would put off no longer, but write this very afternoon to the venerable Consistorium, in whose hands lay the _jus circa sacra_, for a new Ball to the church-steeple; and the rather, as he hoped before new-year"s day to raise a bountiful subscription from the parish for this purpose. If G.o.d spare us till spring," added he, with peculiar cheerfulness, "and thou wert happily recovered, I might so arrange the whole that the ball should be set up at thy first churchgoing, dame!"
Thereupon he shifted his chair from the dinner and dessert table to the work-table; and spent the half of his afternoon over the pet.i.tion for the steeple-ball. As there still remained a little s.p.a.ce till dusk, he clapped his tackle to his new learned _Opus_, of which I must now afford a little glimpse. Out of doors among the snow, there stood near Hukelum an old Robber-Castle, which Fixlein, every day in Autumn, had hovered round like a _revenant_, with a view to gauge it, ichnographically to delineate it, to put every window-bar and every bridle-hook of it correctly on paper. He believed he was not expecting too much, if thereby--and by some drawings of the not so much vertical as horizontal walls--he hoped to impart to his "_Architectural Correspondence of two Friends concerning the Hukelum Robber-Castle_"
that last polish and labor _limae_ which contents Reviewers. For towards the critical Star-chamber of the Reviewers he entertained not that contempt which some authors actually feel--or only affect, as, for instance, I. From this mouldered Robber-_Louvre_, there grew for him more flowers of joy than ever in all probability had grown from it of old for its owners.--To my knowledge, it is an anecdote not hitherto made public, that for all this no man but _Busching_ has to answer.
Fixlein had, not long ago, among the rubbish of the church letter-room, stumbled on a paper wherein the Geographer had been requesting special information about the statistics of the village. Busching, it is true, had picked up nothing,--accordingly, indeed, Hukelum, in his _Geography_, is still omitted altogether;--but this pestilential letter had infected Fixlein with the spring-fever of Ambition, so that his palpitating heart was no longer to be stilled or held in check, except by the a.s.saf[oe]tida-emulsion of a review. It is with authorcraft as with love; both of them for decades long one may equally desire and forbear; but is the first spark once thrown into the powder-magazine, it burns to the end of the chapter.
Simply because winter had commenced by the Almanac, the fire must be larger than usual; for warm rooms, like large furs and bear-skin caps, were things which he loved more than you would figure. The dusk, this fair _chiaroscuro_ of the day, this colored foreground of the night, he lengthened out as far as possible, that he might study Christmas discourses therein; and yet could his wife, without scruple, just as he was pacing up and down the room, with the sowing-sheet full of divine word-seeds hung round his shoulder,--hold up to him a spoonful of alegar, that he might try the same in his palate, and decide whether she should yet draw it off. Nay, did he not in all cases, though fonder of roe-fishes himself, order a milter to be drawn from the herring-barrel, because his good-wife liked it better?--
Here light was brought in; and as Winter was just now commencing his gla.s.s-painting on the windows, his ice flower-pieces, and his snow-foliage, our Parson felt that it was time to read something cold, which he pleasantly named his cold collation; namely, the description of some unutterably frosty land. On the present occasion, it was the winter history of the four Russian sailors on Nova Zembla. I, for my share, do often in summer, when the sultry zephyr is inflating the flower-bells, append certain charts and sketches of Italy, or the East, as additional landscapes to those among which I am sitting. And yet to-night he further took up the _Weekly Chronicle_ of Flachsenfingen; and amid the bombsh.e.l.ls, pestilences, famines, comets with long tails, and the roaring of all the h.e.l.l-floods of another Thirty Years" War, he could still listen with the one ear towards the kitchen, where the salad for his roast-duck was just a-cutting.
Good-night, old Fixlein! I am tired. May kind Heaven send thee, with the young year 1794, when the Earth shall again carry her people, like precious night-moths, on leaves and flowers, the new steeple-ball, and a thick, handsome--boy, to boot!
ELEVENTH LETTER-BOX.
Spring; Invest.i.ture; and Childbirth.
I have just risen from a singular dream; but the foregoing Box makes it natural. I dreamed that all was verdant, all full of odors; and I was looking up at a steeple-ball glittering in the sun, from my station in the window of a little white garden-house, my eyelids full of flower-pollen, my shoulders full of thin cherry-blossoms, and my ears full of humming from the neighboring beehives. Then, methought, advancing slowly through the beds, came the Hukelum Parson, and stept into the garden-house, and solemnly said to me: "Honored Sir, my wife has just brought me a little boy; and I make bold to solicit _your Honor_ to do the holy office for the same, when it shall be received into the bosom of the church."
I naturally started up, and there was--Parson Fixlein standing bodily at my bedside, and requesting me to be G.o.dfather; for Thiennette had given him a son last night about one o"clock. The confinement had been as light and happy as could be conceived; for this reason, that the father had, some months before, been careful to provide one of those _Klappersteins_, as we call them, which are found in the aerie of the eagle, and therewith to alleviate the travail; for this stone performs, in its way, all the service which the bonnet of that old Minorite monk in Naples, of whom Gorani informs us, could accomplish for people in such circ.u.mstances, who put it on....
--I might vex the reader still longer; but I willingly give up, and show him how the matter stood.
Such a May as the present (of 1794) Nature has not, in the memory of man--begun; for this is but the fifteenth of it. People of reflection have for centuries been vexed once every year, that our German singers should indite May-songs, since several other months deserve such a poetical night-music much better; and I myself have often gone so far as to adopt the idiom of our market-women, and instead of May b.u.t.ter, to say June b.u.t.ter, as also June, March, April songs.--But thou, kind May of this year, thou deservest to thyself all the songs which were ever made on thy rude namesakes!--By Heaven! when I now issue from the wavering, checkered acacia-grove of the Castle-garden, in which I am writing this Chapter, and come forth into the broad, living day, and look up to the warming Heaven, and over its Earth budding out beneath it,--the Spring rises before me like a vast full cloud, with a splendor of blue and green. I see the Sun standing amid roses in the western sky, into which he has thrown his ray-brush, wherewith he has to-day been painting the Earth;--and when I look round a little in our picture-exhibition, his enamelling is still hot on the mountains; on the moist chalk of the moist Earth, the flowers full of sap-colors are laid out to dry, and the forget-me-not with miniature colors; under the varnish of the streams, the skyey Painter has pencilled his own eye; and the clouds, like a decoration-painter, he has touched off with wild outlines and single tints; and so he stands at the border of the Earth, and looks back upon his stately Spring, whose robe-folds are valleys, whose breast-bouquet is gardens, and whose blush is a vernal evening, and who, when she arises, shall be--Summer.
But to proceed! Every spring--and especially in such a spring--I imitate on foot our birds of pa.s.sage; and travel off the hypochondriacal sediment of winter; but I do not think I should have seen even the steeple-ball of Hukelum, which is to be set up one of these days, to say nothing of the Parson"s family, had not I happened to be visiting the Flachsenfingen Superintendent and Consistorialrath.
From him I got acquainted with Fixlein"s history,--every Candidatus must deliver an account of his life to the Consistorium,--and with his still madder pet.i.tion for a steeple-ball. I observed, with pleasure, how gayly the cob was diving and swashing about in his duck-pool and milk-bath of life; and forthwith determined on a journey to his sh.o.r.e.
It is singular, that is to say, manlike, that when we have for years kept prizing and describing some original person or original book, yet the moment we see such, they anger us; we would have them fit us and delight us in all points, as if any originality could do this but our own.
It was Sat.u.r.day, the third of May, when I, with the Superintendent, the _Senior Capituli_, and some temporal Raths, mounted and rolled off, and in two carriages were driven to the Parson"s door. The matter was, he was not yet--_invested_, and to-morrow this was to be done. I little thought, while we whirled by the white espalier of the Castle-garden, that there I was to write another book.
I still see the Parson, in his peruke-minever and head-case, come springing to the coach-door and lead us out; so smiling--so courteous--so vain of the disloaded freight, and so attentive to it. He looked as if in the journey of life he had never once put on the _travelling-gauze_ of Sorrow; Thiennette again seemed never to have thrown hers back. How neat was everything in the house, how dainty, decorated, and polished! And yet so quiet, without the cursed alarm-ringing of servants" bells, and without the ba.s.s-drum tumult of stair-pedalling. Whilst the gentlemen, my road-companions, were sitting in state in the upper room, I flitted, as my way is, like a smell over the whole house, and my path led me through the sitting-room over the kitchen, and at last into the churchyard beside the house. Good Sat.u.r.day! I will paint thy hours as I may, with the black asphaltos of ink, on the tablets of other souls! In the sitting-room, I lifted from the desk a volume gilt on the back and edges, and bearing this t.i.tle: "_Holy Sayings, by Fixlein. First Collection_." And as I looked to see where it had been printed, the Holy Collection turned out to be in writing. I handled the quills, and dipped into the negro-black of the ink, and I found that all was right and good. With your fluttering gentlemen of letters, who hold only a department of the foreign, and none of the home affairs nothing (except some other things about them) can be worse than their ink and pens. I also found a little copperplate, to which I shall in due time return.