The finest thing was his awakening in his European Settlement in the giant Schadeck bed!—With the inflammatory, tickling, eating fever of love in his breast; with the triumphant feeling, that he had now got the introductory program of love put happily by; and with the sweet resurrection from his living prophetic burial; and with the joy that now, among his thirties, he could, for the first time, cherish hopes of a longer life (and did not longer mean at least till seventy?) than he could ten years ago;—with all this stirring life-balsam, in which the living fire-wheel of his heart was rapidly revolving, he lay here, and laughed at his glancing portrait in the bed-canopy; but he could not do it long, he was obliged to move. For a less happy man, it would have been gratifying to have measured,—as pilgrims measure the length of their pilgrimage,—not so much by steps as by body-lengths, like Earth-diameters, the superficial content of the bed. But Fixlein, for his own part, had to launch from his bed into warm billowy Life, he had now his dear good Earth again to look after, and a Conrectorship thereon, and a bride to boot. Besides all this, his mother downstairs now admitted that he had last night actually glided through beneath the scythe of Death, like supple-grass, and that yesterday she had not told him merely out of fear of his fear. Still a cold shudder went over him,—especially as he was sober now,—when he looked round at the high Tarpeian Rock, four hours' distance behind him, on the battlements of which he had last night walked hand in hand with Death.
The only thing that grieved him was, that it was Monday, and that he must back to the Gymnasium. Such a freightage of joys he had never taken with him on his road to town. After four he issued from his house, satisfied with coffee (which he drank in Hukelum merely for his mother's sake, who, for two days after, would still have portions of this woman's-wine to draw from the lees of the pot-sediment) into the cooling dawning May-morning (for joy needs coolness, sorrow sun); his Betrothed comes—not indeed to meet him, but still—into his hearing, by her distant morning hymn; he makes but one momentary turn into the blissful haven of the blooming acacia-grove, which still, like the covenant sealed in it, has no thorns; he dips his warm hand in the cold-bath of the dewy leaves; he wades with pleasure through the beautifying-water of the dew, which, as it imparts colour to faces, eats it away from boots ("but with thirty ducats, a Conrector may make shift to keep two pairs of boots on the hook").—And now the Moon, as it were the hanging seal of his last night's happiness, dips down into the West, like an emptied bucket of light, and in the East the other overrunning bucket, the Sun, mounts up, and the gushes of light flow broader and broader.—
The city stood in the celestial flames of Morning. Here his divining-rod (his gold-roll, which, excepting one sixteenth of an inch broken off from it, he carried along with him) began to quiver over all the spots where booty and silver-veins of enjoyment were concealed; and our rod-diviner easily discovered that the city and the future were a true entire Potosi of delights.
In his Conrectorate closet he fell upon his knees, and thanked God—not so much for his heritage and bride as—for his life: for he had gone away on Sunday morning with doubts whether he should ever come back; and it was purely out of love to the reader, and fear lest he might fret himself too much with apprehension, that I cunningly imputed Fixlein's journey more to his desire of knowing what was in the will, than of making his own will in presence of his mother. Every recovery is a bringing back and palingenesia of our youth: one loves the Earth and those that are on it with a new love.—The Conrector could have found in his heart to take all his class by the locks, and press them to his breast; but he only did so to his adjutant, the Quartaner, who, in the first Letter-box, was still sitting in the rank of a Quintaner....
His first expedition, after school-hours, was to the house of Meister Steinberger, where, without speaking a word, he counted down fifty florins cash, in ducats, on the table: "At last I repay you," said Fixlein, "the moiety of my debt, and give you many thanks."
"Ey, Herr Conrector," said the Quartermaster, and continued calmly stuffing puddings as before, "in my bond it is said, payable at three months' mutual notice. How could a man like me go on, else?—However, I will change you the gold pieces." Thereupon he advised him that it might be more judicious to take back a florin or two, and buy himself a better hat, and whole shoes: "if you like," added he, "to get a calfskin and half a dozen hareskins dressed, they are lying upstairs."—I should think, for my own part, that to the reader it must be as little a matter of indifference as it was to the Butcher, whether the hero of such a History appear before him with an old tattered potlid of a hat, and a pump-sucker and leg-harness pair of boots, or in suitable apparel.—In short, before St. John's day, the man was dressed with taste and pomp.
But now came two most peculiarly important papers—at bottom only one, the Petition for the Hukelum parsonship—to be elaborated; in regard to which I feel as if I myself must assist.... It were a simple turn, if now at least the assembled public did not pay attention.
In the first place, the Conrector searched out and sorted all the Consistorial and Councillor quittances, or rather the toll-bills of the road-money, which he had been obliged to pay, before the toll-gates at the Quintusship and Conrectorship had been thrown open: for the executor of the Schadeck testament had to reimburse him the whole, as his discharge would express it, "to penny and farthing." Another would have summed up this post-excise much more readily; by merely looking what he—owed; as these debt-bills and those toll-bills, like parallel passages, elucidate and confirm each other. But in Fixlein's case, there was a small circumstance of peculiarity at work; which I cannot explain till after what follows.
It grieved him a little that for his two offices he had been obliged to pay and to borrow no larger a sum than 135 florins, 41 kreutzers and one halfpenny. The legacy, it is true, was to pass directly from the hands of the testamentary executor into those of the Regiments-Quartermaster; but yet he could have liked well, had he—for man is a fool from the very foundation of him—had more to pay, and therefore to inherit. The whole Conrectorate he had, by a slight deposit of 90 florins, plucked, as it were, from the Wheel of Fortune; and so small a sum must surprise my reader: but what will he say, when I tell him that there are countries where the entry-money into schoolrooms is even more moderate? In Scherau, a Conrector is charged only 88 florins, and perhaps he may have an income triple of this sum. Not to speak of Saxony (what, in truth, was to be expected from the cradle of the Reformation, in Religion and Polite Literature), where a schoolmaster and a parson have nothing to pay,—even in Bayreuth, for example, in Hof, the progress of improvement has been such, that a Quartus—a Quartus do I say,—a Tertius—a Tertius do I say,—a Conrector, at entrance on his post, is not required to pay down more than: