"You are fight there, Karl; but yet I wouldn't have run away. Thunder and lightning! I would sit on my throne and put the crown on my head, and kick and thrash with my arms and legs, if any one touched me."
He came later, saying, "Karl, the post has not come again from Berlin, to-day, and your young Herr rode in splashing through the streets, up to the post-office, to make inquiries himself, and why not? But it came near going badly with him, for some of the burghers were already plotting together there, and asking themselves, by way of example, whether they ought to allow a nobleman to go splashing through the mud like that. Well, he rode off, afterwards, in quite a different manner, towards Moses' house, and then the matter was dropped. I had a word to say to Moses, and went there shortly after, and as I came up he was just coming out of the door; he looked at me, but did not know me; not that I take it unkindly of him, for his head was full of his own affairs, for I could hear Moses saying, 'What I have said, I have said: I will lend no money to a gambler.' Moses is coming here, this afternoon."
So, in the afternoon, Moses came. "Habermann, it is correct, it is all correct about Berlin."
"What? has it broken out there?"
"It has broken out,--but don't say anything about it; this morning the son of Manasseh came to me from Berlin, travelling post; he is going to make a business of buying up old flint-locks, he has got some thirty thousand, left from the year '15."
"What can he do with his flint-locks?" cried Bräsig; "every educated person uses percussion locks, now-a-days."
"What do I know?" said Moses. "I know a good deal, and I know nothing at all. He thinks, when it begins, there will be a demand for the old muskets with the flint-locks, too, and he told me at Berlin they shot with flint-locks and sabres and pistols and cannon on the people, and it went 'Puh! puh!' the whole night, and the cuirassiers rode through the streets, and the people threw stones, and shot out of windows, and from behind the barricades. Terrible! terrible! but don't say anything about it."
"So there was a regular cannonization?" inquired Bräsig.
"Good heavens!" cried Habermann, "what times these are! what dreadful times!"
"Why, what do you call dreadful times? It is always bad times for the foolish, and always good for the wise. When we had good times, I had no reason for drawing in my money, and giving notice here and there. For an old man like me, these are good times."