Schnorps was highly elated to receive it, and his mouth watered at the thought of all the culinary delights which would await him after the music.
When the auspicious day came he devoted an unusual amount of care and attention to his toilet. Although it was only Thursday, he permitted himself the luxury of a clean shirt, bought himself—and this was the rarest of extravagances—a pair of white cotton gloves, even went so far as to brush his black trousers with a certain amount of energy, a thing he never did on ordinary occasions, so as not to wear out the cloth.
“Get my dress-coat out, Sally,” he said in the evening, and she went upstairs in obedience to his behest.
Now it was that something horrible occurred!
As Schnorps’s spouse opened the door of the wardrobe and put her hand in behind all the ancestral garments, she screamed aloud, for there, like a ghost of bygone days, the old swallow-tail grinned at her in the full glory of its invulnerable perfection. She turned it about again and again, and thought she was losing her reason—there was not a particle of doubt of it, it was undeniably the same coat which she had fondly believed she had been wearing on her head in the elaborated and decorative shape of a new hood. In wild excitement she turned the contents of the wardrobe topsy-turvy; trousers and coats were flung about to the right and to the left, but there was no vestige to be seen of the new dress-coat, and with convincing force the certainty came to her that the stupid old seamstress had cut up the new garment instead of the old to manufacture her head-gear therefrom.
So that was the reason it looked so well! Ah, now everything was clear.
“If Schnorps gets wind of this he’ll murder me,” sighed Frau Sally, and so much was certain, this affair must be hushed up for the time being.
But how was she to accomplish this?
She glanced out of the window at the neighbouring house, and a saving idea flitted through her mind. Stealthily she crept downstairs and out at the back door, and hastily entering the house across the way she poured out the sad tale of her misfortunes into the sympathetic ear of her neighbour, imploring her to help her out of her difficulties by lending her the dress-coat of her husband just for this one night.
The good-natured woman was easily won, and an hour later Schnorps, happily unconscious of the state of affairs, and attired in his neighbour’s dress-coat, was on his way to the general, the servant of the latter walking behind him and dragging along his heavy bass viol.