The lackey being gone, Fixlein for joy began to grow sceptical--and timorous (wherefore, to prevent filching, he stowed his Presentation securely in his coffer, under keeping of two padlocks); and devout and softened, since he thanked God without scruple for all good that happened to him, and never wrote this Eternal Name but in pulpit characters, and with colored ink; as the Jewish copyists never wrote it except ornamental letters and when newly washed;[[55]]--and deaf also did the parson, grow, so that he scarcely heard the soft wooing-hour of the Actus--for a still softer one beside Thiennette, with its rose-bushes and rose-honey, would not leave his thoughts. He who of old, when Fortune made a wry face at him, was wont, like children in their sport at one another, to laugh at her so long till she herself was obliged to begin smiling--he was now flying as on a huge seesaw higher and higher, quicker and quicker aloft.

But before the Actus, let us examine the Schadeck Lawyer. Fixlein instead of Füchslein[[56]] he had written from uncertainty about the spelling of the name; the more naturally as in transcribing the Rittmeisterinn's will the former had occurred so often. Von, this triumphal arch, he durst not set up before Füchslein's new name, because Aufhammer forbade it, considering Hans Füchslein as a mushroom, who had no right to vons and titles of nobility, for all his patents. In fine, the Presentation-writer was possessed with Campe's[[57]] whim of Germanizing everything, minding little though when Germanized it should cease to be intelligible;--as if a word needed any better act of naturalization than that which universal unintelligibility imparts to it. In itself it is the same--the rather as all languages, like all men, are cognate, intermarried and intermixed--whether a word was invented by a savage or a foreigner; whether it grew up like moss amid the German forests, or like street-grass, in the pavement of the Roman Forum. The Lawyer, on the other hand, contended that it was different; and accordingly he hid not from any of his clients that Tagefarth (Day-turn) meant Term, and that Appealing was Berufen (Becalling). On this principle, he dressed the word Subrector in the new livery of School-undergovernor. And this version further converted the Schoolmaster into Parson; to such a degree does our civic fortune--not our personal well-being, which supports itself on our own internal soil and resources--grow merely on the drift-mould of accidents, connections, acquaintances, and Heaven or the Devil knows what!--

By the by, from a Lawyer, at the same time a Country Judge, I should certainly have looked for more sense; I should (I may be mistaken) have presumed he knew that the Acts, or Reports, which in former times (see Hoffmann's German or un-German Law-practice) were written in Latin, as before the times of Joseph the Hungarian,--are now, if we may say so without offence, perhaps written fully more in the German dialect than in the Latin; and in support of this opinion, I can point to whole lines of German language to be found in these Imperial-Court-Confessions. However, I will not believe that the Jurist is endeavoring, because Imhofer declares the Roman tongue to be the mother tongue in the other world, to disengage himself from a language, by means of which, like the Roman Eagle, or later, like the Roman Fish-heron (Pope), he has clutched such abundant booty in his talons.----

Toll, toll your bell for the Actus; stream in, in to the ceremony; who cares for it? Neither I nor the Ex-Conrector. The six pygmy Ciceros will in vain set forth before us in sumptuous dress their thoughts and bodies. The draught-wind of Chance has blown away from the Actus its powder-nimbus of glory; and the Conrector that was has discovered how small a matter a cathedra is, and how great a one a pulpit. "I should not have thought," thought he now, "when I became Conrector, that there could be anything grander, I mean a parson." Man, behind his everlasting blind, which he only colors differently, and makes no thinner, carries his pride with him from one step to another; and on the higher step, blames only the pride of the lower.

The best of the Actus was, that the Regiments-Quartermaster and Master Butcher, Steinberg, attended there, embaled in a long woollen shag. During the solemnity, the Subrector Hans von Füchslein cast several gratified and inquiring glances on the Schadeck servant, who did not once look at him. Hans would have staked his head, that, after the Actus, the fellow would wait upon him. When at last the sextuple cockerel-brood had on their dunghill done crowing, that is to say, had perorated, the scholastic cocker, over whom a higher banner was now waving, himself came upon the stage; and delivered to the School-Inspectorships, to the Subrectorship, to the Guardianship, and the lackeyship, his most grateful thanks for their attendance; shortly, announcing to them at the same time, "that Providence had now called him from his post to another; and committed to him, unworthy as he was, the cure of souls in the Hukelum parish, as well as in the Schadeck chapel of ease."

This little address, to appearance, wellnigh blew up the then Subrector Hans von Füchslein from his chair; and his face looked of a mingled color, like red bole, green chalk, tinsel-yellow, and vomissement de la reine.

The tall Quartermaster erected himself considerably in his shag, and hummed loud enough in happy forgetfulness: "The Dickens!--Parson?"----

The Subrector dashed by like a comet before the lackey; ordered him to call and take a letter for his master; strode home, and prepared for his patron, who at Schadeck was waiting for a long thanksgiving psalm, a short satirical epistle, as nervous as haste would permit, and mingled a few nicknames and verbal injuries along with it.

The courier handed in to his master Fixlein's song of gratitude and Füchslein's invectives with the same hand. The dragoon Rittmeister, incensed at the ill-mannered churl, and bound to his word, which Fixlein had publicly announced in his Actus, forthwith wrote back to the new Parson an acceptance and ratification; and Fixlein is and remains, to the joy of us all, incontestible ordained parson of Hukelum.

His disappointed rival has still this consolation, that he holds a seat in the wasp-nest of the Neue Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek.[[58]] Should the Parson ever chrysalize himself into an author, the watch-wasp may then buzz out, and dart its sting into the chrysalis, and put its own brood in the room of the murdered butterfly. As the Subrector everywhere went about, and threatened in plain terms that he would review his colleague, let not the public be surprised that Fixlein's Errata, and his Masoretic Exercitationes, are to this hour withheld from it.