lamenting dolefully enough; and from this he had inferred, it must be an unhappy brother set upon by goblins.”
In the end, his sister’s eyes also were opened to the low character which he had tried to act with me: she sharply flew at him, pushed him with both hands out of his and my door, and called after him: “Wait, thou villain, I will mind it!”
Then hastily turning round, she fell on my neck, and (at the wrong place) into laughter, and said: “The wild fool! But I could not keep my laugh another minute, and he was not to see it. Forgive the ninny, thou a learned man, his ass pranks: what can one expect?”
I inquired whether she, in her nocturnal travelling, had not met with any spectral persons; though I knew that to her, a wild beast, a river, a half-abyss, are nothing. No, she had not; but the gay-dressed town’s-people, she said, had scared her in the morning. O! how I do love these soft Harmonica-quiverings of female fright!
At last, however, I was forced to bite or cut the coloquinta-apple, and give her the half of it; I mean the news of my rejected petition for the Catechetical Professorship. Wishing to spare this joyful heart the rudeness of the whole truth, and to subtract something from a heavy burden, more fit for the shoulders of a man, I began: “Bergelchen, the Professorship affair is taking another, though still a good enough course: the General, whom may the Devil and his Grandmother teach sense, will not be taken except by storm; and storm he shall have, as certainly as I have on my nightcap.”
“Then, thou art nothing yet?” inquired she.
“For the moment, indeed, not!” answered I.
“But before Saturday night?” said she.
“Not quite,” said I.
“Then am I sore stricken, and could leap out of the window,” said she, and turned away her rosy face, to hide its wet eyes, and was silent very long. Then, with painfully quivering voice, she began: “Good Christ stand by me at Neusattel————————63. To apprehend danger from the Education of the People, is like fearing lest the thunderbolt strike into the house because it has windows; whereas the lightning never comes through these, but through their had framing, or down by the smoke of the chimney.
