and prayed aloud: "To thee I commit myself; thou alone heretofore hast cared for thy weak servant; and I swear that I will turn a new leaf,"—a promise which shall be kept nevertheless, though the whole was but stupid treachery and trick.
My prayer had no effect with the unchristian Dragoon, who now, once for all, had got me prisoner in the dragnet of a coverlid; and heeded little whether a guest's bed were, by his means, made a state-bed and death-bed or not. He span out my nerves, like gold-wire through smaller and smaller holes, to utter inanition and evanition; for the bed-clothes at last literally marched off to the door of the room.
Now was the moment to rise into the sublime; and to trouble myself no longer about aught here below, but softly to devote myself to death. "Snatch me away," cried I, and, without thinking, cut three crosses; "quick, despatch me, ye ghosts: I die more innocent than thousands of tyrants and blasphemers, to whom ye yet appear not, but to unpolluted me." Here I heard a sort of laugh, either on the street or in the side-room: at this warm human tone, I suddenly bloomed up again, as at the coming of a new Spring, in every twig and leaf. Wholly despising the winged coverlid, which was not now to be picked from the door, I laid myself down uncovered, but warm and perspiring from other causes, and soon fell asleep. For the rest, I am not the least ashamed, in the face of all refined capital cities,—though they were standing here at my hand,—that by this Devil-belief and Devil-address I have attained some likeness to our great German Lion, to Luther.
Second Day in Flätz;
Early in the morning, I felt myself awakened by the well-known coverlid; it had laid itself on me like a nightmare: I gaped up; quiet, in a corner of the room, sat a red,
79. Weak and wrong heads are the hardest to change; and their inward man acquires a scanty covering: thus capons never moult.
