—that little Julia came back from the castle and brought with her the promise that Aunty (Clotilda) was coming to-morrow. This promised, then, that the Minister's daughter would leave to-morrow. Let no one think hardly of the parsonage-people for their importunity about Clotilda: for on the third holiday she goes to the ball, on the day following to Maienthal,—and all they had left was to-morrow and to-day.... Our Flamin had brought along with him little Julia herself, being well pleased with her office of penny-post. I am morally certain, the Chaplain's wife saw in my hero as much as I write of him, and she loved him so much, that, had she been obliged to decree instead of Fate, she would have died for sorrow, before she could have brought herself to bless the son at the expense of the friend. So very much did he win, by a beautiful blending of refinement, sensibility, and fancy, the fairest and tenderest hearts,—I mean those of women.

This tiny Julia, the after-flora of the faded Giulia, twined together in Victor's soul roses and nettles, and all his flowers of to-day's joy had their roots in tears deep buried in his breast. Even the kiss of Clotilda's friend, of Agatha, affected him. He thought of the Stamitz concert, and of their sitting side by side, and of the crape hat which veiled the grief of two beloved eyes. He begged Agatha to borrow that hat of Clotilda, and make him an exact copy of it, because he wanted to give it as a present. "When she is gone," he said to himself,—"no, when she is dead,—then I will weep without concealment, and tell all men openly that I loved her." My dear fellow, at the souper—a parson can give one—they will ascribe the glistening of thine eyes more to thy self-discharging wit than to the repressed flood of tears, and, if I were at the table, I could not look upon thee for emotion, when during the hammering and "hardening" of the red eggs I saw thee try to fix thy overflowing and downcast eye, half shut, steadfastly on the pole of a red egg, and silently place thy egg-gable under the cross-block of Eymann's egg, in order to gain time for victory over thy voice and eye-socket! And yet I cannot see what important advantage thou wilt then think to gain by this mask, when Old Appel sends thee by the little Iris and express, Julia,—she can never, herself, undertake it,—a stained, tattooed egg, a real, boiled, allegorical picture, and when thou readest over in the fragile shell the flower-pieces etched into it with aqua-fortis, and thy name bordered with forget-me-nots; I say, what help can thy previous dissimulation be to thee, when thou now, in order not to think out the thought "Forget-me-not," hurriest from the room under the double pretext of having to thank Apollonia, and on account of exhaustion, to retire thus early to rest? Ah, the thanking thou wilt! undoubtedly do, but rest thou wilt not!...

SECOND EASTER-HOLIDAY.

Funeral-Discourse on Himself.—Two Opposite Sorts of Fatality to the Wax-Statue.

The snow-heavens had fallen and lay upon the landscape. The snow made me melancholy, and reminded one of the wintry lace-knots of Nature. It was the 1st of April, when Nature, so to speak, made the season itself an April fool. Victor had long ago learned manners (mores) enough to teach him that, when one is visiting a Court-Chaplain, he must go with him to sermon. And then, too, he loved to march to sacristies for the same reason that he loved to steal away to the huts of shepherds, hunters, and fowlers. It did not strike him as overwrought that the Chaplain (as he himself did at last) should place his mounting of the pulpit,—merely on account of the multitude of preparations he made for it,—in point of importance, side by side with the scaling of a wall. Nay, he disputed with him during the long hymn about the surplice-fees of a stillborn fœtus, and proved by a short argument that a parson could demand of every fœtus—and though it were five nights old—the appropriate burial-fees, whether the miserly parents bespoke a funeral sermon for the thing or not. The Chaplain made a weighty objection, but Victor removed it by the weighty proposition that a clergyman (for otherwise he would be cheated out of his best fœtuses) could make every couple pay him burial-fees as often as it could pay baptismal moneys. The Chaplain replied: "It is stupid that the best pastoral Theologies hurry over this point like a pinch of snuff in the wind."

With all the humor of my hero, and with all the gayety of my parson,—who on every holy eve scolded and, condemned like a revolutionary tribunal, and who on every first holiday softened, till on the third he became absolutely an angel,—the world should promise itself something different from what nevertheless is coming: namely, that Victor saw gleaming out of every hour of the approaching evening which was to bring Clotilda for the last time but one into his company, a protruding sacrificial knife against which he must press his wounded bosom. She was invited to-day, as it were to a farewell-supper,—the three twins of course.

At last she came at evening on the arm of the misunderstood Matthieu.—If, as Ruska asserts, the number of devils (44,435,556) who, according to the assertion of Guliermus Parisiensis, flank a dying Abbess, is made much too small,[[39]] one can readily imagine how many devils may form the escorting squadron of a living, a blooming one. I, for my part, assume as many devils around a fair one, as there are male persons.

When Clotilda appeared with that face of hers smiling down into its fading beauty, with the exhausted lute-voice, which sorrow draws from us, as a peculiar pianoforte variation, by the pressure of the stop,—but is it not with men as with organs, of which the human voice goes most finely with tremolos?—when she thus appeared, then had her noblest friend the choice, either to fall down before her with the words, "Let me die first," or to be, to-day, right funny.

He chose the latter (excepting with her) by way of drowning his dreams. He therefore flung about him with stories and healthy observations. Therefore he threw into the imperial military chest against sentimentalism this satirical contribution, that it was the March-gall or moist-gall in the human field, i. e. a spot that always remained damp, and on which everything rotted. As this availed nothing, he entered into alliance with whole states, and promised himself some help from remarking concerning them, that their summits, like forest-trees, had grown into each other, and that it had no effect to saw one through down below,—that the equality of kingdoms was a substitute or a preparation for the equality of ranks,—and that gunpowder, which had hitherto been the sticking powder of the great powers, would finally burn out and heal the hydrophobous wounds of the human race. At last, when he plainly perceived that it helped him very little, as he expressed the conjecture that Europe would one day become the North India, and the same North which had once been the breaking-tools and building-materials of the earth would be so once more, but the North in the other hemisphere, he struck, with his chemical process, into the wet road, and (like a secretary of legation) instead of politics took—punch.

But only cares, not melancholy nor love, can be drowned by drinking. The other spirits, dissolved in the nervous spirit, array themselves in a magically sparkling circle around every idea, around every emotion, which thou hast therein, as in breweries the lights, by reason of the steam; burn in a colored circle. The glass with its hot cloud is a Papin's digester[[40]] even to the densest heart, and decomposes the whole soul; the draught makes every one at once more tender and bold. A soft heart was of old ever associated with a bold, hardened fist. As it kept on snowing, he offered Clotilda for to-morrow his shell-shaped sleigh and himself (as he was, besides, invited to the ball) as knight-errant,—whereby he compelled the Evangelist to offer himself as sledge-gondolier to the stepmother.