“Should your Lordship find it necessary to become possessed of a certain quantity of my wife’s hair—the undersigned hereby undertakes to cut and deliver the same himself. In the event of your Lordship’s being minded to exercise a jus compascui, or right of free common and pasturage in my premises, and appearing therein in person, I shall embrace with much pleasure the opportunity then afforded me of plucking as many of your Lordship’s own hairs as may be requisite to constitute a souvenir out of your Lordship’s head, by the roots, like monthly radishes, with my own hands. While I was in Nürnberg, I used often to go and dine in the neighbouring villages (against the will of the authorities) with a fine old Prugel Knecht,[[27]] i. e. with a private tutor, who had towzed out and excerpted from the heads of three little slips of nobility, while he was giving them their lessons, enough silky hair to make him a handsome mouse-coloured bag-wig, which the man most probably wears to this day. His motive in thus applying himself to the production of silk, or rather, his reason for divesting these little heads of their exterior foliage, was, that his own beams might the more effectually ripen the fruit within, as, for similar reasons, it is usual to remove leaves from the vines in August.
“I have the honour to remain, &c.”
I shall be very sorry if I cannot manage to get the reader to understand that the advocate wrote this biting letter without the slightest bitterness of feeling. He had read the brilliant satirical writings of the three merry wise men of London, Butler, Swift, and Sterne—those three bodies of the satirical giant, Geryon, or three furies (Parcæ) of the foolish—to such an extent that, as their disciple and follower, he never thought whether it was a biting letter or not. In his admiration of the artistic beauties of his composition, he lost sight of its meaning; and indeed, if a stinging speech were made to himself, he would think nothing of the length of its prickles in comparison with its form and shape. I need merely instance his ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers;’ the satirical poison bubbles and venomous prickles so frequent in that work came from his pen and ink—i. e. his head only, not from his heart.
I take the opportunity of begging the reader always to infuse the very soul of gentleness and kindness into every word and tone he utters (because it is our words more than our deeds which make people angry), and, more particularly still, into every page he writes. For, truly, even if your correspondents have forgiven you an epistolary pereat long ago, yet the old leaven of ill-will ferments anew, if the sorrel-leaf of a letter containing it chances to come to hand again. We may, of course, on the other hand, reckon upon a similar immortality for a piece of epistolary kindness. Truly, though a long, cutting December wind had made my heart stiff and immoveable to everything in the shape of kindly feeling for one who, once on a time, used to write me absolute Epistles of St. John, tender pastorals of letters, what would it matter, if I should but chance to turn up these old letters in my letter-treasury of bundles and packets of letters?
The sight of the beloved handwriting, the welcome seal, the kind, endearing words, and the pieces of paper where so many a pleasure found space to sport and play, would cast the sunshine of the old affection upon the frozen heart once more; it would reopen at the memory of the dear old time, as some flower that has closed reopens when a sunbeam lights upon it, and its only thought—ay, were it but the day before yesterday that it had conceived itself mortally offended—would be, “Ah! I was too hard upon him (or her) after all.” Many of the saints in the first century used to drive devils out of the possessed, in a somewhat similar way, merely by means of letters.
Furboots came, as if he had been sent for, on the Saturday evening, like a Jewish Sabbath. I have often seen a guest serve as cement or hefting powder to two better halves in a state of fracture, because shame and necessity compelled them to speak and behave kindly to each other, at all events while the guest was there. Every husband should be provided with two or three visitors of this sort, to come in when he’s suffering from an attack of wife-possessed-too-long-with-the-devil-of-dumbness; as long as the people are there, at all events, she must speak, and take the iron thief-apple of silence—which grows on the same stalk as the apple of discord—out of her mouth.
The Schulrath stood up before Lenette Wendeline as if she were one of his school girls, and asked her if she had borne this first cross of her married life patiently, and like a worthy sister in suffering of the patriarch Job. She drooped her big eyes, wound a thread the length of a finger into a white snowball, and breathed deeper. Her husband answered for her: “I was her brother in affliction, and bore the cross-bar of the burden—I without a murmur, she without a murmur. In the twelfth century, the heap of ashes on which Job endured his sufferings used still to be shown. Our two chairs are our heaps of ashes; there they are still to be seen!”
“Good woman!” said Stiefel, in the softest pianissimo of his pedal reed-stop of a masculine voice, and laid his snow-white hand on the soft, raven hair upon her forehead. Siebenkæs heard a multiplying sympathetic echo of these words in his heart, and laid his arm on Lenette’s shoulders, who was blushing with pleasure at the honour conferred upon her by this kindness of the man in office. Her husband softly pressed her left side to his right, and said:—
“She is good, indeed; she is gentle, and quiet, and patient, and only too industrious. If the whole tag, rag and bobtail of Hell’s army, in the shape of the Venner, had only not advanced upon our little summer-house of happiness, to knock its roof off, we should have lived happy in it for many a day, Mr. Stiefel, far into the winter of our lives. For my Lenette is good, and too good for me and for many another man.” Here Stiefel, in his emotion, surrounded that hand of hers which had the skein of thread in it, at the seat of the pulse with his fine fingers—the empty hand being in her husband’s possession—and the Wound Water of our pain, the great drops of which trickled from her drooped eyes down her cheeks, where her imprisoned hands could not wipe them away, made the two male hearts very tender. And besides, her husband could never praise any one long without his eyes overflowing. He went on, faster, “Yes, she might have been very comfortable and well-off with me, but that my mother’s money is kept back from me in this terrible way. But, even for all that, I should have made her happy without the money, and she me—we never had a word, never a single unhappy moment—now had we, Lenette? nothing but peace and love, till the Venner came. He has taken a good deal from us!”
The Schulrath raised his clenched fist in wrath, and exclaimed, sawing the air with it, “You child of hell! you robber-captain and filibuster! You silken Catiline and mischief-maker! Does it ever strike you that you’ll have to answer for this and your other pranks one day? Mr. Siebenkæs, this, at all events, I do expect of you, that if ever he comes here again asking for hair, you will turn him out by the hair of his own head, or hit this fur-maggot (as you call him yourself) across the shoulders with a boot-jack, and squeeze his hand with a pair of pincers—in fact, the long and the short of it is, I will not have him come here any more.”