"Oh! Really? How interesting!"
At this remark Hans threw his head back and laughed. "Is it so?" he said. "Indeed, now, how interesting do you find it?"
"Well," I replied, after some hesitation, "we have a word in our language which expresses it. 'Quite' is the word. I find it quite interesting, though, to tell you the truth, my dear Mr. Mayor, I never heard of Herr Gorgonzola before. In our country almost every town of importance has an author of which it is proud, and it was only my desire to be tactful that kept me from asking, when you mentioned Gorgonzola, who on earth he was. The fact that I never heard of him does not prove that he is not a great man. What has he written?"
"Nothing—practically nothing. He hasn't even written a poem for the Schnitzelhammerstein Blaetter."
"Then why do you call him an author?" I asked.
"Because," Hans replied, naïvely, "every man has to do something, and poor old Gorgonzola is nothing else. Besides, he called himself that."
There was a pause. I was more or less baffled to know what to say, and in accordance with the old German maxim, "When you nothing have to say already, do not say it yet," I deemed it well to keep silent. Fortunately, before the silence that followed became too deep, Pumpernickel himself put in with,
"He did not want to call himself an author, but he had to. You know we have a Directory here in our city—a great, thick, heavy book—"
"Which he wrote?" I suggested, desiring to say something, for I had in mind that other old proverb, "He who says nothing, has nothing to say; and having nothing to say, therefore thinks nothing in his brains."
"Not at all, not at all," cried Hans, impatiently. "He merely let them use his name in it for completeness' sake. You see, it was this way," the Mayor continued. "When Bingenburg and Rheinfels went to our Board of Trade and said let us get up the Directory of this city, the Board of Trade said: 'Donner and Blitzen! not unless you make it complete. The last Directory was full of addresses that no one wished to know, and had none that would help a stranger to our town.'