another--and for another, and always for another, because no man's life is sufficient to answer that question--so the jurist, when he is asked, "What is justice?" keeps continually asking for more and more delays--he can never reply to the question--indeed, if the judges and clients would let him, he would gladly devote his whole life to writing replies to a legal question of this sort. Advocates are so used to this way of looking at matters, that it never strikes them that there is anything unusual about it. I return to my story. This blow of the iron secular arm, with its six long thief- and writing-fingers, all but felled Siebenkæs to the earth. The vapours about his path in life condensed to morning mist, the morning mist to evening clouds, the clouds to showers of rain. "Many a poor devil has more to do than he can manage," he said. If he had had a pleasant, cheerful wife, he would not have said this; but one such as his, who painfully _trailed_ her cross (instead of taking it up), and was all lamentations--an elegiac poetess, a Job's comforter--was herself a _second_ cross to bear. He set to work and thought the whole thing over; he had hardly enough left to buy the next year's almanack, or a bundle of Hamburgh quills (for his satires used up Lenette's feather dusters much more than his own energies, so that he often thought of cutting Stiefel's red pipe-stalk into a pen); he would have been delighted to convert his plates into something to eat (there were none left, however), following the example of the Gauls, who used round pieces of bread as plates first, and afterwards as dessert; or of the Huns, who, after riding upon pieces of beef (by way of saddles) till it was partly cooked, dined upon these saddles. His half-boots would need to be new fronted, and abbreviated for the third time, before the arrival of the impending shooting-match day; and of the necessary requisites for the performance of that operation the only one in existence was the artist, Fecht the cobbler. In short, for that important occasion he had nothing to put on his back or in his pocket, his bullet-pouch, or his powder-horn.