The first thing Siebenkæs opened was not his mouth, but the door, and then the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, from which he carefully and with a good deal of gravity took down a bell-shaped tureen and three pewter plates, and put them on a chair. Lenette could no longer stand by in silence; she clasped her hands and said in a faint voice of shame, "Merciful Providence! is it come to selling our dishes?" "I'm only going to turn them into silver," he said; "as kings make church bells into dollars, so shall we make our bell-dishes into coin. There's nothing you need be ashamed about in converting trash of table ware, the coffins of beasts, into currency, when Duke Christian of Brunswick turned a king's silver coffin into dollars in 1662. Is a plate an apostle, do you think? Great monarchs have taken many an apostle, if he happened to be a silver one, Hugo of St. Caro and others as well, divided them (as it were) into chapters, verses, and legends, sent them to the mint, and then dispatched them off all over the world in that analysed form." "Ah! stupid nonsense," she answered. Some few readers will probably say "What else was it?" and I ought long ago to have apologized, perhaps, for the style of speech, so incomprehensible to Lenette, which the advocate makes use of. He justified it satisfactorily to himself by the consideration that his wife always had some DISTANT idea of what he was talking about, even when he made use of the most learned technical expressions, and the farthest-fetched plays upon words, because of its being good practice, and of his liking to hear himself do it. "Women," he would repeat, "have a distant and dim comprehension of all these things, and therefore don't waste, in long tedious efforts to discover the precise signification of these unintelligibilities, precious time which might be better employed." This, I may observe, is not much encouragement for Reinhold's 'Lexicon to Jean Paul's Levana,' nor for me personally either, in some senses. "Ah! stuff and nonsense" had been Lenette's answer. Firmian merely asked her to bring the pewter into the sitting-room, and he would talk the matter over sensibly. But he might as well have set forth his reasons before a woman's skin stuffed with straw. What she chiefly blamed him for, was that by his contribution to the shooting-club purse he had emptied hers. And thus she herself suggested to him the best answer he could have made. He said, "It was an angel that put it in my head; because on St. Andrew's Day I shall regain everything that I turn into silver now, and repewterise it immediately. To please you, I shall keep not only the tureen and the plates I get as prizes, but all the rest of the pewter ware, and put it all into your cupboard. I assure you I had made up my mind before to sell all my prizes."