"I will swear from this day forward," I exclaimed, "that the students are pomadig." "Have pomade," said he, correcting me, "for we are no pomadenhengste. When I am laid up some day," he continued, "I will make you a vocabulary of our terms with their synonymes, and shall felicitate myself thereby on contributing to a more perfect knowledge of the German language in England. You will take care to publish it?" "Assure yourself of that," I replied.
"But what has the Boot-fox brought?" asked my host of his friend, who during this time had been in conversation with a queer-looking fellow. "A duplicate diploma from Schmidt," he replied. "What has the old boy then bitten of the sour apple at last!" "Yes! he has worked like a dragon--he has geoxed tremendously during the last year, and has now taken the highest degree."
Freisleben sings:--
Therefore lets he fall a tear,
And thinks--ah! but youth was dear!
And gives me an examen summa cum laude.
"I am very curious," said I, "to know who the man was that walked in without knocking, and whom you styled Boot-fox. He looked like a servant that, instead of livery, a man has stuck into a student's coat; and what a cap he had on! And besides that, he had such a curious voice that one could have thought it belonged to some other person, or that somebody else was in the room when he spoke."
"Ha! ha! I will explain that to you. This odd fellow belongs to a class of ministering spirits who live entirely by the students. We dub them Boot-foxes, because they clean our boots and clothes. They are bound to run also on our commissions, and must figure in processions and public pageants. As the poor devil must turn out very early in the mornings, his voice snaps and cracks huskily from the effects of the raw air, like that of a youth in the transition-state from a hobbledehoy to a man, till by degrees it balances itself in one key. For the rest, he is a respectable father of a family, and his wife is generally a washerwoman for the students."
"All that is easy enough to understand," I replied. "Why do you call him a boot-fox?"
"Ah, I forgot to observe, that in earlier times the foxes, who, as you know are students just come from the schools, and whom we yet play many a joke upon, were frequently obliged, very improperly, to perform those offices which our Famulus now discharges, and thence this name dates itself."
"I have made myself acquainted," said I, "with a new species of foxes. The other day I heard a professor spoken of as a school-fox."
"Yes, yes; this name is given contemptuously to one of those teachers who, without penetrating into the spirit of knowledge, turns into his scholars, by hogsheads, the unfermented deluge of material, and reckons a man learned if he has only piled up in his hollow skull a chaos of things merely gathered by rote. God be praised, these scarecrows become scarcer from day to day. Yet, alas! there lies in the German word Gelehrter, the idea of one who has been taught without our being able to say whether he has actually learned. The French say not les enseignes but les savants; and the English not the taught ones. but the learned."