What a fatal thing is the popular pride of a free city! cries one historian—The Strasburgers deemed it a diminution of their freedom to receive an imperial garrison——so fell a prey to a French one.
The fate, says another, of the Strasburgers, may be a warning to all free people to save their money.———They anticipated their revenues——brought themselves under taxes, exhausted their strength, and in the end became so weak a people, they had not strength to keep their gates shut, and so the French pushed them open.
Alas! alas! cries Slawkenbergius, ’twas not the French,——’twas CURIOSITY pushed them open———The French indeed, who are ever upon the catch, when they saw the Strasburgers, men, women, and children, all marched out to follow the stranger’s nose——each man followed his own, and marched in.
Trade and manufactures have decayed and gradually grown down ever since—but not from any cause which commercial heads have assigned; for it is owing to this only, that Noses have ever so run in their heads, that the Strasburgers could not follow their business.
Alas! alas! cries Slawkenbergius, making an exclamation—it is not the first——and I fear will not be the last fortress that has been either won——or lost by Noses.
THE END OF
Slawkenbergius’s Tale
[ CHAPTER I]
With all this learning upon Noses running perpetually in my father’s fancy——with so many family prejudices—and ten decads of such tales running on for ever along with them——how was it possible with such exquisite——was it a true nose?——That a man with such exquisite feelings as my father had, could bear the shock at all below stairs——or indeed above stairs, in any other posture, but the very posture I have described?
——Throw yourself down upon the bed, a dozen times——taking care only to place a looking-glass first in a chair on one side of it, before you do it—But was the stranger’s nose a true nose, or was it a false one?
To tell that before-hand, madam, would be to do injury to one of the best tales in the Christian-world; and that is the tenth of the tenth decad, which immediately follows this.