Another would have been stupid enough to begin at the very beginning; but I thought to myself, I can at any time tell where I live,—in fact, at the Equator, for I reside on the island of St. John's, which lies, as is well known, in the East Indian waters, which are entirely surrounded by the principality of Scheerau. For nothing can be less unknown to good houses, which keep their regular literary waste-book (the Fair-Catalogue) and their regular stock-book (the Literary Times), than my latest home product, the Invisible Lodge,—a work, the reading of which my sovereign should make still more obligatory on his children, and even on his vassals, (it would not expressly contradict the Recesses,) than the attending the national university. In this Lodge, now, I have placed the extraordinary pond better known by the name of the East Indian Ocean, and into which we, of Scheerau, have steered and moored the few Moluccas and other islands on which our productive business lies. While the invisible lodge was being transformed by the press into a visible one, we again prepared an island,—namely, the isle of St. John's, on which I now live and write.
The following digression ought to be attractive, because it discloses to the reader why I prefixed to this book the crazy title, Dog-post-days.
It was day before yesterday, on the 29th of April, that I was walking in the evening up and down my island. The evening had already spun itself into haze and shadow. I could hardly see over to Tidore Island,[[18]] that monument of fair, sunken spring-times, and my eye glanced round only on the near buddings of twig and blossom, those wing-casings of growing Spring,—the plain and coast around me looked like a tiring-room of the flower-goddess, and her finery lay scattered and hid in vales and bushes round about,—the moon lay as yet behind the earth, but the well-spring of her rays shot up already along the whole rim of heaven,—the blue sky was at length pierced with silver spangles, but the earth was still painted black by the night. I was looking only at the heavens,—when something plashed on the earth....
It was a little Pomeranian dog, who had leaped into the Indian Ocean, and was now heading full for St. John's. He crawled up on my coast and rained a shower of drops as he waggled near me. With a dog who is an utter stranger, it is still more disagreeable undertaking to spin a conversation than with an Englishman, because one knows neither the character nor the name of the animal. The dog had some business with me, and seemed to be a plenipotentiary. At last the moon opened her sluices of radiance, and brought me and the dog into full light.
"To his Well-Born,
Superintendent of Mines,[[19] ]Mr. Jean Paul,
on
Free.
St. John's."
This address to me hung down from the neck of the animal, and was pasted to a gourd-bottle which was tied to his collar. The dog consented to my taking off his iron collar, as the Alpine dogs do their portable refectory-table. I extracted from the bottle, which in sutlers' tents had often been filled with spirit, something which intoxicated me still better,—a package of letters. Savans, lovers, people of leisure, and maidens are passionately sharp-set upon letters; business-people, not at all.
The whole package (name and hand were strange to me) turned upon the one point, to wit, that I was a famous man, and had intercourse with kings and emperors;[[20]] and that there were few mining intendants of my stamp, etc. But enough! For I must needs not have an ounce of modesty left in me if, with the impudence which some really possess, I should go on excerpting and extracting from the letters, that I was the Gibbon and the Möser[[21]] of Scheerau, (to be sure only in the biographical department, but then what flattery!)—that every one who possessed a life, and would see it biographically delineated by me, should set about the matter at once, before I was pressed away by some royal house as its historiographer, and could absolutely no longer be had,—that it might occur in my case as in that of other mine-intendants, before whom often the deluded public never took off its hat, until they had already passed into another lane,[[22]] i. e. world, etc. Who apprehends this last more than myself? But even this apprehension does not bring a modest man to the point of lowering himself down to be the bellows-blower to the man that shall sound his eulogy; as I to be sure should have done, if I had gone on to lay myself entirely bare. To my feeling even those authors are odious, who, in their shamelessness, only then bring up the rear with the final flourish, that modesty forbids them to say more, when they have already said everything that modesty can forbid.
At length my correspondent ventures out with his design, namely, to make me the compiler of an unnamed family history. He begs, he intrigues, he defies. "He is able,"—he writes more copiously, but I abridge all, and in fact I deliver this epistolary extract with uncommonly little understanding; for I have been this half-hour scratched and gnawed in an unusually exasperating manner by a cursed beast of a rat,—"to establish everything for me by documentary evidence, but is not allowed to communicate to me any other names of the personages in this history than fictitious ones, because I am not wholly to be trusted,—in time he will explain everything to me,—for this is a history upon which and its development destiny itself is still working, and what he hands over to me is only the snout thereof, but he will duly make over to me one member after another, just as it falls off from the lathe of time, until we get the tail;—accordingly the epistolary Spitz will regularly swim back and forth as a poste aux ânes,[[23]] but I must not on any account sail after the postman; and thus," concludes the correspondent, who signs himself Knef, "shall the dog, as a Pegasus, bring me so much nutritious sap, that, instead of the thin Forget-me-not of an annual, I may rear a thick cabbage-head or cauliflower of folios."