"Come, come," said Bräsig, "every business must be settled beforehand, and I give you warning: for every tear my little godchild sheds on your account I will give your neck a twist," and he looked as fierce as if he were prepared to do it immediately.
"Thank you Mining," said he, as she brought him the flower, and he smelled it, and stuck it in his buttonhole.
"And now, come here, Mining, I will give you my blessing. No, you need not fall on your knees, since I am not one of your natural parents, but merely your godfather. And you, Monsieur Rudolph, I will stand by you this afternoon, when your father comes, and help you out of this clerical scrape. And now, come, both of you, we must go in. But I tell you, Rudolph, don't sit reading, by the ditches, but attend to the manure-strewing. You see there is a trick in it, the confounded farm-boys must take the fork, and then not throw it off directly, no! they must first break it up three or four times with the fork, so that it gets well separated. A properly manured field ought to look as neat and fine as a velvet coverlid."
With that, he went, with the others, out of the garden gate.
CHAPTER XIX.
Towards the middle of the afternoon, the merchant Kurz, and the rector Baldrian were approaching the Rexow farm.
Kurz had invited the rector to be his companion, to his own detriment, for a little man appears to fearful disadvantage beside a long-legged fellow, and nature, in cheating Kurz of his rightful dimensions, appeared to have endowed the rector with the surplus. So they walked along the road, and the rector made a joke; he said that they two together reminded him of the metre, which the Romans called a dactyl, long, short, short; long, short, short. That provoked Kurz, since it was disparaging to his legs and his capabilities as a pedestrian; he took the longest possible steps.
"Now we can pass for a spondee," said the rector.
"Do me the favor, brother-in-law," said Kurz, angrily, and wholly out of breath, "to spare me your learned witticisms. They are altogether too much for me." And he wiped off the sweat from his face, pulled off his coat, and hung it over his stick.
In his belief, Kurz was properly a materialist, but by trade he was a mercer. There were always remnants left over, in this business, which was quite a convenience to a man of his short stature, since he could use them up for himself. When he had cleared out his old stock last year, he had a piece of ladies' dress goods left on hand, on which were represented giraffes plucking at a palm-tree. He could not think of throwing it away, and he could not get rid of it, so he had it made up into a summer coat for himself, and he was now marching on the Rexow farm, with this banner over his shoulder, as if he were the youngest standard-bearer in the army of a German prince, who bore a giraffe and a palm-tree in his shield; and rector Baldrian stalked by his side, in a yellow nankeen coat, like a right file-leader, in the body-guard of the German prince, who might, for a change, have adopted yellow nankeen as a uniform.