A POTATO WAR WITH WOMEN—AND WITH MEN—A WALK IN DECEMBER—TINDER FOR JEALOUSY—A WAR OF SUCCESSION ON THE SUBJECT OF A PIECE OF CHECKED CALICO—RUPTURE WITH STIEFEL—SAD EVENING MUSIC.
I should very much like to make an incidental digression about this point; however, I feel that I don’t dare.
You see there are, now-a-days, so very few readers (at all events, of the younger and more aristocratic sort) who don’t know everything—while, at the same time, they expect their pet authors (and I don’t blame them for it) to know more than themselves—which is impossible. By the help of the English machinery (now brought to such high perfection), of encyclopædias, of encyclopædic-dictionaries, of conversations-lexicons, of excerpts from conversations-lexicons, of Ersch and Gruber’s ‘Universal Dictionaries of all the Sciences,’ a young man, after devoting his days to it for a month or two (he has no occasion to devote his nights) converts himself into a perfect Senatus Academicus of all the Faculties of a University, which he represents in his own single person; besides, in a sense, also himself standing to it in the relation of the student-body at the same time.
I have never, myself, met with a phenomenal youth of the sort above described, unless it were, perhaps, a fellow I once heard playing in the Baireuth band, who represented in his own person a whole Royal Academy of Music—a complete orchestra—inasmuch as he held, carried, and played upon instruments of every kind. This Panharmonist performing, to us partial harmonists only (as we were), blew a French horn, which he held under his right arm, and this right arm bowed a fiddle placed under his left; and that left arm beat, at the proper moments, a drum which was fastened on his back; his cap was hung round with bells, out of which he shook an accompaniment “alla Turca,” by moving his head, and he had a cymbal strapped upon each of his knees, which he banged vigorously together; so that the man was all music, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot So that, one is tempted to make this simile-man an occasion and ground-work of further similes, and liken him to a prince who represents in his own person all the instruments of his State, and all its members and representatives. Now, in the presence of readers who are all-knowers, just as this man was an all-player, how is a humble individual such as I, who am but a mere Heidelberg master of seven arts, at the outside, and doctor of a small trifle of philosophy, or so, to venture to take upon himself to attempt such a thing as a bit of a digression with any approach to the clever or the felicitous about it? No; the safe course, in the circumstances, for me is to go quietly on with my story.
We find the advocate, Siebenkæs, once more, then, in full blossom of hope; although that blossom is all sterile, and not of the sort which bears fruit. After his royal shot, he had reckoned upon, at any rate, as many happy days as the money would last for—upon fourteen at least; but mourning-black, now the traveller’s uniform, ought to have been the colour of his upon his earthly night-journey—that voyage pittoresque for poets. Though marmots and squirrels know how to plug up that particular hole in their dwellings which chances to be on the side from which the approaching storm is coming, men do not; Firmian thought if the hole in his purse was mended no more was necessary. Alas! a better thing than money now departed from him—Love. His good Lenette receded to a greater distance from his heart, as he did from hers, day by day.
Her having concealed from him the fact that Rosa had given back the wreath, formed in his heart (as foreign matter lodged in any vessel of the body always does) the nucleus of a gradual deposit of stone about it. But that was only a small matter.
For she brushed and scraped of a morning, and every morning, and that whether (as the saying goes) he “liked it or lumped it.”
She would persist, and insist, on communicating all her prorogations of parliament and other decrees to the servant girl, in several duplicates and revised copies, let him protest as much as he chose.
She asked him every thing she had to ask him (no matter what) two or three separate times over; and that whether he shouted beforehand like a quack doctor at a fair, or swore afterwards like one of his customers.
She continued to say, “It has struck four quarters to four o’clock.”