The servant-girl brought back only "kind regards;" not the leaves of silver which his ink should have crystallised into. Peltzstiefel had not given the matter a thought. He was so absorbed in his studies that he was indifferent to his own money, and blind to the poverty of other people. He was capable, indeed, of noticing a _hiatus_; but it must be in a manuscript--not in his own or other people's shoes, stockings, &c. An inward fire blinded this fortunate man to the phosphorescence of the rotten wood around him. And happy is every actor in the school-theatricals of life who finds the lofty inward delusion suffice to compensate him for the delusions without, or to hide them from his view;--who is so carried away by the enthusiasm with which he enters into and renders his spiritual _rôle_, that the coarse daubs of landscapes of the scenery seem to bloom, and the branches to rustle in the refreshing showers (of peas) from the rain-box--and who does not wake to reality at the shifting of the scenes. But this beautiful blindness of the Rath was very distressing to our two dear friends; their little constellation, which was to have shone in their evening sky, fell all down in meteoric drops upon the earth. I do not blame Stiefel; he had an ear for distress, though not an eye. But ye rich and great ones of the earth, who, helpless in the honeycombs of your pleasures, swimming with clogged wings in your melted sugar of roses, do not find it an easy matter to move your hand, put it into your money-bag, and take out the wage of him who helped to fill your honey-cells--an hour of judgment will strike at last for _you_, and ask you if ye were worthy to _live_, let alone to live a life of pleasure, when ye avoid even the _trifling_ trouble of _paying_ the poor who have undergone the _immense_ trouble of _earning_. But ye would be better if ye thought what misery your comfortable, indolent, indisposition to open a purse, or to read a little account, often inflicts upon the poor; if ye pictured to yourselves the backward start of hopeless disappointment of some poor woman whose husband comes home without his money--the starvation, the obliteration of so many hopes, and the weary sorrowful days of a whole family.