I saw here, when too late, that I had struck on a subject which enlivened him up prodigiously. I did, indeed, instantly make a jump to a quite different topic, saying, "it is probably the safest way of all, to have improper books deposited in _public_ libraries, where the librarians are of the usual type, because the rudeness of their manners and their disagreeable behaviour, does more to prevent these books from being read than an edict of the censorship." But Jacobus would speak out his thought, "Pauline, don't let me forget that the woman Stenzin hasn't paid her fine yet." It was uncommonly annoying that, just when I got sleep lured on to within a step or two of him, the Captain should all of a sudden draw his trigger and let off a thing calculated to blow all my sleeping powder to the four winds of heaven. There is nobody more difficult to weary than a person who wearies everybody else. I would rather undertake to weary out a lady who happens to have nothing to do in five minutes' time, than a man of business in as many hours. Pauline, the darling, anxious to hear the stories which I had accompanied in manuscript to Berlin, put slowly into my hand one by one the following letters from her letterbox: "STORY"--i. e. she wanted to be told the "Dog Post Days" that evening. So I set to work again, and, with a sigh, began in this way: "The fact is, Mr. Oehrmann, that your humble servant here will soon be setting letters of this sort flying about in Berlin, by his new book, and my 'Post Days' may be printed on shirts quite as fine as those your sons' names are being printed upon, if the people happen to have made their paper from such. But, indeed, I must admit to you that as I was sitting on the coach on my way to Berlin, with my right foot under my manuscripts, and my left beneath a bale of petitions on their way to the Prince of Scheerau, with the army, the only thing I had in the way of a comforting thought was this very natural one, 'Devil make a better of it all!' Only he's just the very last person to _do it_. For, good heavens! in an age like this present age of ours, when the instruments of universal world history are only _being tuned_ in the orchestra before the concert begins, that is to say, are all grumbling and squeaking together in confusion (which was why on one occasion the tuning of the orchestra pleased a Morocco Ambassador at Vienna much better than the opera itself)--in such an age, when it is so hard to tell the coward from the brave man--him who lets everything go as it pleases from him who strives to do something great and good--those who are withering up from those who are flourishing and promising fruit, just as in winter the fruit-bearing trees look much the same as the dead ones--in such an age, there is only one consolation for an author, one which I have not yet spoken of to-night, and it is this: that, after all, though it be an age in which the nobler kinds of virtue,