I scarce know rightly how it happened; but here, while I am anxiously studying the foolish twisted visage of the shaver, and he just then chanced to lay his long-whetted weapon a little too abruptly against my bare throat, I gave him such a sudden bounce on the abdominal viscera, that the silly varlet had well-nigh suicidally slit his own windpipe. For me, truly, nothing remained but to indemnify the man; and then, contrary to my usual principles, to tie round a broad stuffed cravat, by way of cloak to what remained unshorn.
80: In the summer of life, men keep digging and filling ice-pits as well as circumstances will admit; that so, in their Winter, they may have something in store to give them coolness.
28: It is impossible for me, amid the tendril-forest of allusions (even this again is a tendril-twig), to state and declare on the spot whether all the Courts or Heights, the (Bougouer) Snowline of Europe, have ever been mentioned in my Writings or not; but I could wish for information on the subject, that if not, I may try to do it still.
And now at last I sallied forth to the General, drinking out the remnant of the Pontac, as I crossed the threshold. I hope, there were plans lying ready within me for answering rightly, nay for asking. The Petition I carried in my pocket, and in my right hand. In the left I had a duplicate of it. My fire of spirit easily helped over the living fence of ministerial obstructions; and soon I unexpectedly found myself in the ante-chamber, among his most distinguished lackeys; persons, so far as I could see, not inclined to change flour for bran with any one. Selecting the most respectable individual of the number, I delivered him my paper request, accompanied with the verbal one that he would hand it in. He took it, but ungraciously: I waited in vain till far in the sixth hour, at which season alone the gay General can safely be applied to. At last I pitch upon another lackey, and repeat my request: he runs about seeking his runaway brother, or my Petition; to no purpose, neither of them could be found. How happy was it that in the midst of my Pontac, before shaving, I had written out the duplicate of this paper; and therefore—simply on the principle that you should always keep a second wooden leg packed into your knapsack when you have the first on your body—and out of fear that if the original petition chanced to drop from me in the way between the Tiger and Schabacker's, my whole journey and hope would melt into water—and therefore, I say, having stuck the repeating work of that original paper into my pocket, I had, in any case, something to hand in, and that something truly a Ditto. I handed it in.
36: And so I should like, in all cases, to be the First, especially in Begging. The first prisoner-of-war, the first cripple, the first man ruined by burning (like him who brings the first fire-engine), gains the head-subscription and the heart; the next-comer finds nothing but Duty to address; and at last, in this melodious mancando of sympathy, matters sink so far, that the last (if the last but one may at least have retired laden with a rich "God help you!") obtains from the benignant hand nothing more than its fist. And as in Begging the first, so in Giving I should like to be the last: one obliterates the other, especially the last the first. So, however, is the world ordered.
Unhappily six o'clock was already past. The lackey, however, did not keep me long waiting; but returned with—I may say, the text of this whole Circular—the almost rude answer (which you, my Friends, out of regard for me and Schabacker, will not divulge) that: "In case I were the Attila Schmelzle of Schabacker's Regiment, I might lift my pigeon-liver flag again, and fly to the Devil, as I did at Pimpelstadt." Another man would have dropt dead on the spot: I, however, walked quite stoutly off, answering the fellow: "With great pleasure indeed, I fly to the Devil; and so Devil a fly I care." On the road home I examined myself whether it had not been the Pontac that spoke out of me (though the very examination contradicted this, for Pontac never examines); but I found that nothing but I, my heart, my courage perhaps, had spoken: and why, after all, any whimpering? Does not the patrimony of my good wife endow me better than ten Catechetical Professorships? And has she not furnished all the corners of my book of Life with so many golden clasps, that I can open it forever without wearing it? Let henhearts cackle and pip; I flapped my pinions, and said: "Dash boldly through it, come what may!" I felt myself excited and exalted; I fancied Republics, in which I, as a hero, might be at home; I longed to be in that noble Grecian time, when one hero readily put up with bastinadoes from another, and said: "Strike, but hear!" and out of this ignoble one, where men will scarcely put up with hard words, to say nothing of more. I painted out to my mind how I should feel, if, in happier circumstances, I were uprooting hollow Thrones, and before whole nations mounting on mighty deeds as on the Temple-steps of Immortality; and in gigantic ages, finding quite other men to outman and outstrip, than the mite-populace about me, or, at the best, here and there a Vulcanello. I thought and thought, and grew wilder and wilder, and intoxicated myself (no Pontac intoxication therefore, which, you know, increases more by continuance than cessation of drinking), and gesticulated openly, as I put the question to myself: "Wilt thou be a mere state-lapdog? A dog's-dog, a pium desiderium of an impium desiderium, an Ex-Ex, a Nothing's-Nothing?—Fire and Fury!" With this, however, I dashed down my hat into the mud of the market. On lifting and cleaning this old servant, I could not but perceive how worn and faded it was; and I therefore determined instantly to purchase a new one, and carry the same home in my hand.
136: If you mount too high above your time, your ears (on the side of Fame) are little better off than if you sink too deep below it: in truth, Charles up in his Balloon, and Halley down in his Diving-bell, felt equally the same strange pain in their ears.
I accomplished this; I bought one of the finest cut. Strangely enough, by this hat, as if it had been a graduation-hat, was my head tried and examined, in the Ziegengasse or Goat-gate of Flätz. For as General Schabacker came driving along that street in his carriage, and I (it need not be said) was determined to avenge myself, not by vulgar clownishness, but by courtesy, I had here got one of the most ticklish problems imaginable to solve on the spur of the instant. You observe, if I swung only the fine hat which I carried in my hand, and kept the faded one on my head,—I might have the appearance of a perfect clown, who does not doff at all: if, on the other hand, I pulled the old hat from my head, and therewith did my reverence, then two hats, both in play at once (let me swing the other at the same time or not), brought my salute within the verge of ridicule. Now do you, my Friends, before reading farther, bethink you how a man was to extricate himself from such a plight, without losing head! I think, perhaps, by this means: by merely losing hat. In one word, then, I simply dropped the new hat from my hand into the mud, to put myself in a condition for taking off the old hat by itself, and swaying it in needful courtesy, without any shade of ridicule.
Arrived at the Tiger,—to avoid misconstructions, I first had the glossy, fine and superfine hat cleaned, and some time afterwards the mud-hat or rubbish-hat.