Dog-days' Vacation.--Visits.--An Indigent of Quality.
EGIDIUS ZEBDÄUS FIXLEIN had just for eight days been Quintus,[[36]] and fairly commenced teaching duties, when Fortune tabled out for him four refreshing courses and collations, besprinkled with flowers and sugar. These were the four canicular weeks. I could find in my heart, at this hour, to pat the cranium of that good man who invented the Dog-days' Vacation. I never go to walk in that season, without thinking how a thousand down-pressed pedagogic persons are now erecting themselves in the open air; and the stiff knapsack is lying unbuckled at their feet, and they can seek whatsoever their soul desires; butterflies,--or roots of numbers,--or roots of words,--or herbs,--or their native villages.
The last did our Fixlein. He moved not, however, till Sunday,--for you like to know how holidays taste in the city; and then, in company with his Shock and a Quintaner, or Fifth-Form boy, who carried his Green nightgown, he issued through the gate in the morning. The dew was still lying; and as he reached the back of the gardens, the children of the Orphan Hospital were uplifting with clear voices their morning hymn. The city was Flachsenfingen, the village Hukelum, the dog Schil, and the year of Grace 1791.
"Manikin," said he, to the Quintaner, for he liked to speak, as Love, children, and the people of Vienna do, in diminutives, "Manikin, give me the bundle to the village; run about, and seek thee a little bird, as thou art thyself, and so have something to pet too in vacation-time." For the manikin was at once his page, lackey, room-comrade, train-bearer, and gentleman in waiting; and the Shock also was his manikin.
He stept slowly along, through the crisped cole-beds, overlaid with colored beads of dew; and looked at the bushes, out of which, when the morning wind bent them asunder, there seemed to start a flight of jewel-colibri, so brightly did they glitter. From time to time he drew the bell-rope of his--whistle, that the manikin might, not skip away too far; and he shortened his league and half of road, by measuring it not in leagues, but in villages. It is more pleasant for pedestrians--for geographers it is not--to count by wersts than by miles. In walking, our Quintus furthermore got by heart the few fields on which the grain was already reaped.
But now roam slower, Fixlein, through His Lordship's garden of Hukelum; not, indeed, lest thy coat sweep away any tulip-stamina, but that thy good mother may have time to lay her Cupid's-band of black taffeta about her smooth brow. I am grieved to think my fair readers take it ill of her, that she means first to iron this same band; they cannot know that she has no maid; and that to-day the whole Preceptorial dinner--the money purveyances the guest has made over to her three days before--is to be arranged and prepared by herself, without the aid of any Mistress of the Household whatever; for indeed she belongs to the Tiers État, being neither more nor less than a gardener's widow.
You can figure how this true, warm-hearted mother may have lain in wait all morning for her Schoolman, whom she loved as the apple of her eye; since, on the whole populous Earth, she had not (her first son, as well as her husband, was dead) any other for her soul, which indeed overflowed with love; not any other but her Zebedäus. Could she ever tell you aught about him, I mean aught joyful, without ten times wiping her eyes? Nay, did she not once divide her solitary Kirmes (or Churchale) cake between two mendicant students, because she thought Heaven would punish her for so feasting, while her boy in Leipzig had nothing to feast on, and must pass the cake-garden like other gardens, merely smelling at it?
"Dickens! Thou already, Zebedäus!" said the mother, giving an embarrassed smile, to keep from weeping, as the son, who had ducked past the window, and crossed the grassy threshold without knocking, suddenly entered. For joy she forgot to put the heater into the smoothing-iron, as her illustrious scholar, amid the loud boiling of the soup, tenderly kissed her brow, and even said Mamma; a name which lighted on her breast like downy silk. All the windows were open; and the garden, with its flower-essences, and bird-music, and butterfly-collections, was almost half within the room. But I suppose I have not yet mentioned that the little garden-house, rather a chamber than a house, was situated on the western cape of the Castle garden. The owner had graciously allowed the widow to retain this dowager-mansion; as indeed the mansion would otherwise have stood empty, for he now kept no gardener.
But Fixlein, in spite of his joy, could not stay long with her; being bound for the Church, which, to his spiritual appetite, was at all times a king's kitchen; a mother's. A sermon pleased him simply because it was a sermon, and because he himself had once preached one. The mother was contented he should go; these good women think they enjoy their guests, if they can only give them aught to enjoy.
In the choir, this Free-haven and Ethnic Forecourt of stranger church-goers, he smiled on all parishioners; and, as in his childhood, standing under the wooden wing of an archangel, he looked down on the coifed parterre. His young years now enclosed him like children in their smiling circle; and a long garland wound itself in rings among them, and by fits they plucked flowers from it, and threw them in his face. Was it not old Senior Astman that stood there on the pulpit Parnassus, the man by whom he had been so often flogged, while acquiring Greek with him from a grammar written in Latin, which he could not explain, yet was forced to walk by the light of? Stood there not behind the pulpit-stairs the sacristy-cabin, and in this was there not a church-library of consequence--no school-boy could have buckled it wholly in his book-strap--lying under the minever cover of pastil dust? And did it not consist of the Polyglot in folio, which he, spurred on by Pfeiffer's Critica Sacra, had turned up leaf by leaf, in his early years, excerpting therefrom the literæ inversæ majusculæ minusculæ, and so forth, with an immensity of toil? And could he not at present, the sooner the more readily, have wished to cast this alphabetic soft-fodder into the Hebrew letter-trough, whereto your Oriental Rhizophagi (Rooteaters) are tied, especially as here they get so little vowel hard-fodder to keep them in heart?--Stood there not close by him the organ-stool, the throne to which, every Apostle-day, the Schoolmaster had by three nods elevated him, thence to fetch down the sacred hyssop, the sprinkler of the Church?