And they'll peer all through my productions to see whether or not I've written them quite legibly and distinctly (not too large or too small), whether I've put any wrong letters, a little e for a big, or an f instead of a ph, whether the hyphen-strokes are too long or too short, and all that sort of thing: indeed they often even give opinions about the thoughts in the book (which they have nothing to do with). Now you see, if you go on scrubbing and swishing about with besoms behind me, I shall keep writing all sorts of stuff and nonsense, and it'll all be printed. Of course that's a terrible thing to happen to a man, for these tasters tear great frightful holes and wounds in the paper however fine it is, with nails as long as fingers (buttonmakers' nails are shorter, but not circumcisers' among the Jews), before they give it a name to carry about with it, as the circumcisers do to the Jew boys. And after this, they circulate a slip of unsized paper, in which they find fault with me, and give me a bad name, all over the empire, in Saxony and Pomerania, and tell all Swabia in so many plain words that I'm an ass. May the devil confound their impertinence! This is the sort of birching, you see, that besom of yours will be getting me in for. Whereas, if I write beautifully and legibly, and with proper attention and ability--and every sheet of my Devilish Papers is so written--if I carefully weigh and consider every word and every page before I write it, if I am playful in one place, instructive in another, pleasing in all,--in that case I am bound to tell you, Lenette, that the tasters are people who are quite capable of appreciating work of that sort, and would think nothing of sitting down and circulating papers in which the least they would say of me would be that I had certainly brought something away from college in my head, and had a little to show for my studies. In short, they would say, they hadn't expected it of me, and there was really something _in me_. Now a panegyric of this kind upon a husband is reflected, of course, upon his wife, and when the Augspurg people are all asking 'Where does he live, this Siebenkæs whom everybody's talking of?' there are sure to be lots of folks in the Fuggery to answer, 'Oh! he lives in Kuhschnappel, his wife was a daughter of Engelkraut, the senate clerk, and a very good wife she is to him.'" "You've told me all that about bookmaking hundreds of times," she answered. "And it's just what the bookbinder says too; and I am sure _he_ has all the best books through his hands, binding them."