The old man--who had grown suspicious on account of the length of time I had remained the evening before--had this evening only _pretended_ to be asleep, that he might see what I was going to be at. The rapidity with which he went asleep (the reader no doubt remembers it at the beginning of the book) ought to have struck me more than it did. I ought to have reckoned on a contrary state of matters myself, and been ready with more prefaces in addition to this present one, to serve as sleeping powders. The rascally eavesdropper lay in wait till I had made my report on the two Flower-pieces and the four first chapters of this book. At the end of the fourth he bounced up as a mole-trap does when one walks on it, and addressed me from behind with the following harangue of congratulation--"Has the devil got you by the coat-tails? You must come here from Berlin, must you, and stuff my daughter's head with all sorts of atheistical, nonsensical, romantic balderdash and nonsense, till she'll be of no more use in a shop than----" "Just listen to one word, Herr Pigtail!" said I quite quietly, taking him into the next room, where there was neither fire nor light; "just listen to one single, _half_-word!" I put my hands upon his shoulders, and said, "Herr Pigtail--for in Charles the Great's time every officer was so styled, because in those days the soldiers wore tails, as the women do now--Herr Pigtail, I'm not going to have a tussle with you to-night, when the old year's going out and the new year's coming in. I assure you solemnly that I am the son of the ----,[32] and that I shall never see you more, though you shall have all the Vienna letters just the same. But I implore you, for God's sake, to allow your daughter to read. Now-a-days every tradesman reads--one of whom will be her husband--and every tradesman's wife. Yet for all this reading, there's still plenty of spinning and cooking going on; there are shirts in plenty, and fat people in abundance. And as for _corrupting_ her--why! that's just what a man who reads will find it most difficult to accomplish in the case of a woman who reads, and most easy in the case of one who hardly knows her A B C. Let me entreat you, Captain." "If you would but just mind your own affairs! What's the girl to _you_?" was his reply. It was a true harbour of refuge for me that, on neither of these two evenings, the Christmas Eve or the New Year's, had I, in the enthusiasm of narration, so much as touched anything of the daughter's but about a groschen's worth of hair (and that not her own), which got among my fingers somehow or other, I hardly know how.