"I can't do it till to-morrow, Lenette! Don't be vexed, darling! Tell me, are you quite as you used to be in Augspurg? Don't you understand me? Have you not the slightest idea what I am driving at?" She answered quite innocently, "Now you will be annoyed, Firmian, I know, but I really have _not_ the slightest idea." Then the Goddess of Peace took from the God of Sleep his poppy garland, and twined it into her own olive wreath and led the wedded pair, garlanded and reconciled, hand in hand into the glittering, gleaming, icefields of the land of dreams--the magic shadowy background of the noisy jarring, shifting day--our camera obscura full of moving miniature pictures of a world all dwarfed, in which man, like the Creator, dwells alone with his own creations. END OF THE PREFACE AND OF THE FIRST BOOK. The reader will remember that, at the beginning of the preface, I stated that I succeeded in putting the old merchant into a sweet sleep, and in providing his daughter with a gladsome feast of tabernacles, in the shape of the young unopened buds of this, my little cottage-garden here. But the foul fiend knows how to breeze up a sudden rain squall, and let it splattering down upon all our loveliest fireworks. I was only performing a duty in converting myself into a small, pocket circulating library for a poor lonely thing of a girl, whose father gave her no chance of a word or two of rational conversation except with her parrot, and with the family lawyer aforesaid. The cage of the former was placed near her inkstand and waste-book; and he acquired from his mistress as much in the shape of German-Italian as a bookkeeper finds necessary for carrying on his foreign correspondence. And a parrot being always incited to talkativeness by a looking-glass in his cage, he and his language-mistress were enabled to look at themselves in it together. The latter (the family lawyer) I myself was. But the Captain--for fear of seductive princess-kidnappers and pirates such as me, and because her mother was dead, and because she was useful in the business--would let her speak to no man whomsoever, except in the presence of a third party (viz., himself). So that it was very seldom any man came to the house, except me; whereas, a father generally decoys whole museums of insects into his house by means of a blooming daughter, just as a cherry-tree in blossom near a window fills a room with wasps and bees. It wasn't exactly everybody who, when he wanted to speak a rational word with her (_i. e_. one her father shouldn't hear), could manage to draw the flute stop of his organ, and then play away for an hour to this Argus till he should close his hundred green eyes, so that two blue ones might be looked into. I _did_ manage it, indeed; but the world shall hear what sort of a psalm of thanksgiving and vote of thanks I was treated to for my pains.