He was scarcely down stairs before Lenette gave deep, but not loud, expression to her woes, saying he had "dunned them now, and that the whole house must know all about their disreputable style of housekeeping: had he not talked about furniture?" It was incomprehensible how the poor woman could have fancied anybody had been in the dark about it before! Poor people are always the first to nose out poverty. At the same time Firmian had been ashamed to tell the _Friseur_ that he had been obliged to appoint himself auctioneer of his own furniture. Here he perceived that he blushed for his poverty more before one person, and before the poor, than he did before a whole town, and before the rich; and he flew into a furious indignation with these execrable _eructations_ of human vanity in his noblest parts. The path from hence to St. Andrew's Day, all bordered with nothing but thistles as it is, cannot possibly seem longer, even to the reader, than it did to my hero, who, moreover, had to take hold of the thistles and pull them up with his own hands. The garden of his life kept getting more and more like a _jardin Anglais_, where only prickly and barren trees, but no fruit-trees, were to be found. Every night, when he opened the latch of his bed-railings, he would say, with great enjoyment, to his Lenette, "Only twenty (or nineteen, or eighteen, or seventeen) days now to the shooting-match." But the hairdresser and auction-crier had played the deuce and all with Lenette, though the evenings were long and dark and splendidly convenient for needy borrowers on deposit, veiling and hiding the naked, abashed, misery of the poor; she was ashamed the people in the house should know, and afraid to meet them. Firmian, who was astonished equally at the inexhaustible resources of his brain and of his house, and who kept saying to himself, "Do you know, I'm really curious to see what I shall hit upon to-day again, and how I shall manage to get out of _this_ difficulty now--" Firmian, a day or two after the Michaelmas dinner, got his eye upon two more good articles of furniture--a long cask-siphon and a rocking-horse (a relic of his childhood). "We haven't a cask, and we haven't a baby," he said. But his wife implored him, for heaven's sake, "not to put her to this shame. The horse and the siphon" (she said) "are things that would stick out of the basket so terribly, or out from under one's apron, and in the moonlight everybody would see them." And yet _something_ must go! Firmian said, in an odd cutting, yet sorrowful way, "It must be so! Fate, like Pritzel,[49] is beating on the bottom of the drum, and the oats are jumping on the top of it; we have got to eat off the drum."