Our friend had no need to disquiet himself about any of the would-be fruit-gatherers--about the second, eighth, or ninth, till it came to the eleventh--and he was the Saxon, who shot like the demon in person. There were few among the seventy who didn't wish this accursed gallows-number at the deuce, or at all events into the vegetable kingdom, where it is altogether absent.[50] The hairdresser fired, struck the eagle on the leg, and the leg remained hanging aloft, with the imperial globe in the talons. His lodger (and lawyer) came up to the scratch, but the landlord stood still in the trench, to satisfy his soul with curses of his luckless star. As the former levelled the sights of his rifle upon the ball above, he made up his mind that he would not aim at the ball at all, but at the eagle's tail, so as simply to _shake_ the apple down. In one second the worm-eaten world-apple fell. The Saxon cursed beyond all description. Siebenkæs all but offered up an inward prayer, not because a pewter mustard-pot, a sugar-dish, and five florins came showering along with the apple into his lap, but for the piece of good luck--for the warm burst of sunshine which thus came breaking out from among the clouds of the distant storm. "Thou wouldst prove this soul of mine, happy Fortune," thought he, "and thou placest it, as men do watches, in all positions--perpendicular and horizontal, quiet and unquiet--to see if it will go and mark the time correctly in all, or no. Ay, truly! it _shall_!" He let this little, bright, miniature earth-ball roll from one hand to the other, spinning and weaving, as he did so, the following brief chain of syllogisms:--"What a genealogical tree of copies! Nothing but pictures within pictures comedies within comedies! The emperor's globe is an emblem of this terrestrial globe of ours--the core of each is a handful of earth--and this emperor's globe of mine, again, is a miniature emblem of a real emperor's, with even less of earth--none at all, in fact. The mustard-pot and sugar-dish, again, are emblems of this emblem. What a long, diminishing series, ere man arrives at enjoyment!" Most of man's pleasures are but _preparations_ for pleasure; he thinks he has attained his _ends_, when he has merely got hold of his _means_ to those ends. The burning sun of bliss is beheld of our feeble eyes but in the seventy mirrors of our seventy years. Each of these mirrors reflects that sun's image less brightly--more faint and pale--upon the next; and in the seventieth it shimmers upon us all frozen, and is become a moon.