He ran home, but without his globe, for he did not mean to tell her of that till the evening. It was a great refreshment to him to slip, during his shooting vacations, away from the public turmoil to his quiet little chamber, give a rapid narrative of anything of importance going on, and then cast himself back into the _mêlée_. As his number was a next-door neighbour to Rosa's, and they had, consequently, their holidays at the same time, it surprises me that he did not come upon Herr von Meyern beneath his own window, inasmuch as that gentleman was walking up and down there, with his head elevated, like an ant. He who desires to destroy a young gentleman of this species, let him look for him _under_ (if not _in_) a lady's window; just as an experienced gardener, when he wants to kill woodlice or earwigs, needs only lift up his flower-pots to annihilate them by the score. Siebenkæs did not hit so much as another shaving the whole of the afternoon; even the very tail, which he had attacked with such success in his bold stroke for the conquest of the globe of the holy Roman empire, resisted all his efforts to knock it off. He let himself be drummed and fifed home by the town militia towards evening. When he got to his wife's door, he there assumed the _rôle_ of Knecht Ruprecht (the children's "Bogie," who, on St. Andrew's Day, bestows upon them, for the _first_ time in their career, fruit, and fear along with the same), and, growling in a terrible manner, chucked his (wooden) apple in to her; a piece of fun which delighted her immensely. But really I ought not to record such little trifles. As Firmian laid his head on his pillow, he said to his wife, "This time to-morrow, wife, we shall know if it be two crowned heads that we are going to lay on the pillow, or not! I shall just _recall_ this important minute to your memory to-morrow night, when we're going to bed!" When he got up in the morning he said, "Very likely this is the last time that I shall rise a common, ordinary person, without a crown." He was so anxious to have the mutilated bird (all wet with dew, a mass of gunshot wounds and compound fractures) once more before his bodily eyes, that he hardly knew how to possess himself in patience till the time came. But it was only as long as he _did not_ see the eagle that his hopes of shooting himself into a king at him endured. He was, therefore, delighted to agree to a proposal made by the clever Saxon, whose bullet had throughout the proceedings always cleared the way for his number-neighbour's; the proposal was, "we go shares in gains and in losses--in the bird and in the cardinal." This copartnership doubled the advocate's hopes by the process of halving them.