SPIEGEL. Eh, brother? Eli? And proper fellows they are! You must confess the blessing of heaven is visibly upon me; I was a poor, hungry wretch, and had nothing but this staff when I went over the Jordan, and now there are eight-and-seventy of us, mostly ruined shopkeepers, rejected masters of arts, and law-clerks from the Swabian provinces. They are a rare set of fellows, brother, capital fellows, I promise you; they will steal you the very buttons off each other's trousers in perfect security, although in the teeth of a loaded musket,* and they live in clover and enjoy a reputation for forty miles round, which is quite astonishing.
*[The acting edition reads, "Hang your hat up in the sun, and I'll
take you a wager it's gone the next minute, as clean out of sight
as if the devil himself had walked off with it.">[
There is not a newspaper in which you will not find some little feat or other of that cunning fellow, Spiegelberg; I take in the papers for nothing else; they have described me from head to foot; you would think you saw me; they have not forgotten even my coat-buttons. But we lead them gloriously by the nose. The other day I went to the printing-office and pretended that I had seen the famous Spiegelberg, dictated to a penny-a-liner who was sitting there the exact image of a quack doctor in the town; the matter gets wind, the fellow is arrested, put to the rack, and in his anguish and stupidity he confesses the devil take me if he does not—confesses that he is Spiegelberg. Fire and fury! I was on the point of giving myself up to a magistrate rather than have my fair fame marred by such a poltroon; however, within three months he was hanged. I was obliged to stuff a right good pinch of snuff into my nose as some time afterwards I was passing the gibbet and saw the pseudo-Spiegelberg parading there in all his glory; and, while Spiegelberg's representative is dangling by the neck, the real Spiegelberg very quietly slips himself out of the noose, and makes jolly long noses behind the backs of these sagacious wiseacres of the law.
RAZ. (laughing). You are still the same fellow you always were.
SPIEGEL. Ay, sure! body and soul. But I must tell you a bit of fun, my boy, which I had the other day in the nunnery of St. Austin. We fell in with the convent just about sunset; and as I had not fired a single cartridge all day,—you know I hate the diem perdidi as I hate death itself,—I was determined to immortalize the night by some glorious exploit, even though it should cost the devil one of his ears! We kept quite quiet till late in the night. At last all is as still as a mouse —the lights are extinguished. We fancy the nuns must be comfortably tucked up. So I take brother Grimm along with me, and order the others to wait at the gate till they hear my whistle—I secure the watchman, take the keys from him, creep into the maid-servants' dormitory, take. away all their clothes, and whisk the bundle out at the window. We go on from cell to cell, take away the clothes of one sister after another, and lastly those of the lady-abbess herself. Then I sound my whistle, and my fellows outside begin to storm and halloo as if doomsday was at hand, and away they rush with the devil's own uproar into the cells of the sisters! Ha, ha, ha! You should have seen the game—how the poor creatures were groping about in the dark for their petticoats, and how they took on when they found they were gone; and we, in the meantime, at 'em like very devils; and now, terrified and amazed, they wriggled under their bedclothes, or cowered together like cats behind the stoves. There was such shrieking and lamentation; and then the old beldame of an abbess—you know, brother, there is nothing in the world I hate so much as a spider and an old woman—so you may just fancy that wrinkled old hag standing naked before me, conjuring me by her maiden modesty forsooth! Well, I was determined to make short work of it; either, said I, out with your plate and your convent jewels and all your shining dollars, or—my fellows knew what I meant. The end of it was I brought away more than a thousand dollars' worth out of the convent, to say nothing of the fun, which will tell its own story in due time.
RAZ. (stamping on the ground). Hang it, that I should be absent on such an occasion.
SPIEGEL. Do you see? Now tell me, is not that life? 'Tis that which keeps one fresh and hale, and braces the body so that it swells hourly like an abbot's paunch; I don't know, but I think I must be endowed with some magnetic property, which attracts all the vagabonds on the face of the earth towards me like steel and iron.
RAZ. A precious magnet, indeed. But I should like to know, I'll be hanged if I shouldn't, what witchcraft you use?
SPIEGEL. Witchcraft? No need of witchcraft. All it wants is a head—a certain practical capacity which, of course, is not taken in with every spoonful of barley meal; for you know I have always said that an honest man may be carved out of any willow stump, but to make a rogue you must have brains; besides which it requires a national genius—a certain rascal-climate—so to speak.*
*[In the first (and suppressed) edition was added, "Go to the
Grisons, for instance; that is what I call the thief's Athens."
This obnoxious passage has been carefully expunged from all the
subsequent editions. It gave mortal offence to the Grison
magistrates, who made a formal complaint of the insult and caused
Schiller to be severely rebuked by the Grand Duke. This incident
forms one of the epochs in our author's history.]