“Schloo—oo—oo—oo—ooop.”
“Confound Adam Kloot and his oysters to boot!” exclaimed the offended Madame Doppeldick, irritated beyond all patience at the bovine apathy of her connubial partner. “I wish, I do, that the nets had burst in catching them!”
“Why, what can one do, Malchen?” asked honest Dietrich, looking up for the first time from the engrossing dish, whence the one-a-penny oysters had all vanished, leaving only the two-a-penny ones behind.
“Saint Ursula only knows!” sighed Madame Doppeldick, her voice relapsing into its former tone of melancholy. “I only know that I will never undress in the room!”
“Then you must undress out of it, Malchen. Schloo—oop. Schloo—oo—oo—oo—ooop.”
“I believe that must be the way after all,” said Madame Doppeldick, on whose mind her husband’s sentence of transcendental philosophy had cast a new light. “To be sure there is a little landing-place at the stair-head, and our bed is exactly opposite the door—and if one scuttled briskly across the room, and jumped in—But are you sure, Dietrich, that you explained every thing correctly to the Captain? Did you tell him that his was the one next the window—with the patchwork coverlet?”
“Not a word of it!” answered honest Dietrich, who like all other Prussians had served his two years as a soldier, and was therefore moderately interested in military manœuvres. “Not a word of it—we talked all about the review. But I did what was far better, my own Malchen, for I saw him get into the bed with the patchwork coverlet, with my own eyes, and then took away his candle—Schloo—oo—oop!”
“It was done like my own dear, kind Dietrich,” exclaimed the delighted Madame Doppeldick, and in the sudden revulsion of her feelings, she actually pulled up his huge round bullet-head from the dish, and kissed him between the nose and chin.
The Domestic Dilemma was disarmed of its horns, Madame Doppeldick saw her way before her, as clear and open as the Rhine three months after the ice has broken up. From that moment, as long as the dish contained two oysters, the air of “Schloo—oo—oo—oo—ooop” was sung, as “arranged for a duet.”