Now I thought I should portray, in his likeness, some of the more striking features of the great Buying-public; for he is a sort of portable miniature of it--like itself, he cares only for bread-studies, and beer-studies, for no talk but table-talk, no literature but politics--he knows that the magnet was only created to hold up his shop-door key if he chooses to stick it on to it--the tourmaline only to collect his tobacco ashes, his daughter Pauline to take the place of both (although she attracts stronger things, and with greater attractive power than either)--he knows no higher thing in the world than bread, and detests the town painter, who uses it to rub out pencil marks with. He and his three sons, who are immured in three of the Hanse towns, read or write no other, and no less important, books than the waste-book and the ledger. * * * * * "May I be d--d," thought I, as I was warming myself at the stove, "if I can paint the Buying-public to greater perfection than under the name of Jacob Oehrmann, who is but a twig, or fibre, of it; but then it couldn't possibly know what I meant" it occurred to me; and on account of this error in my calculations, I have to-day hit upon quite another plan. Just as I had committed my error the daughter came in, rectified her father's, and brought out the balance correctly. Oehrmann looked at me now, and became to some extent conscious of my existence; and, on my presenting the Vienna epistles by way of credentials (epistles of this kind are more to him than poetical, or St. Pauline, epistles)--from being a mere fresco figure on the wall, as I had been up to that time, I became a something possessed of a mind and a stomach, and I was asked (together with the latter) to stay to supper. Now, although the critics may set all the cliques and circles of Germany about my ears--aye, and have a new Turkish bell cast specially for the purpose--I mean to make a clean breast of it here, and state in plain words that it was solely on account of the daughter that I came, and that I stayed, there. I knew that the darling would have read all my recent books, if the old man had given her time to do it; and for that very reason it was impossible for me to blink the fact that it was incumbent upon me as a simple duty to talk, if not to sing, her father to sleep, and then tell his daughter all that I had been telling the world, though the agency of the press. This, as of course you perceive, was why I usually came there to have a talk on the evenings of his foreign mail days, when it didn't take much to put him to sleep. On the Christmas Eve, then, what I had to do was to condense and abridge my "45 Dog Post Days" into the space of about the same number of minutes; a longish business, rendering a sleep of no brief duration necessary.