score of a beershop full of labourers, or, like Cæsar, give free commons to an entire town. The poor who _have_ houses give to the poor who have not--one lazzarone gives to another--as shell-fish become the habitations of other crustaceans, and earthworms are the habitable universes of lesser worms. In the evening arrived Peltzstiefel, who was too learned a man to eat swine's flesh, or a measure of salt, among the untaught vulgar. And then Siebenkæs could once more entertain an idea unintelligible to any one but Stiefel. He could lay the sceptre and the tinted glass-ball of the imperial globe upon the table, and in his capacity of king of the feast and of the eagle, say that his long hair served him for a crown, like that of the old Frank kings, his own crown having been knocked down by his landlord's rifle; he could assert that the rule by which only he by whose hands the eagle was brought down became king was clearly imitated from the code of the Fraticelli Berghadi, who could only elect to the papacy a person who had killed a child. That 'twas true he had it not in his power to reign over Kuhschnappel so long by fourteen days as the King of Prussia over the ecclesiastical see of Elten (the latter period being one of _fifteen_ days)--that 'twas true he had a crown and revenues, but the latter were sadly reduced, cut down by one-half, in fact--and that he was far too much like the Great Mogul, who formerly had an income of two hundred and twenty-six millions a year, but now receives only the one hundred and thirteenth part of that sum; however, at his (Siebenkæs's) coronation, though there had been no general liberation of the _wicked_ prisoners, yet _one good_ one had been released, namely, himself; also that, like Peter the Second of Arragon, he had been crowned with nothing worse than bread: finally that, under his ephemeral rule, nobody was beheaded, robbed, or beaten to death; and--which delighted him most of all--the feeling that he was like one of the ancient German princes, who governed, defended, and increased a free people, and was a member of that free people himself, &c. &c. The throats in this royal chamber grew louder and drier as the evening advanced; the pipes (those chimneys of the mouth) made of the room a heaven of clouds, and of their heads heavens of joy. Outside, the autumn sun brooded, with warm, flaming wings, over the cold, naked earth, as if in haste to hatch the spring. The guests had drawn the quint, (I mean the five prizes of the five senses) out of the ninety numbers, or ninety years of the lottery of human life; the famished eyes were sparkling, and in Firmian's soul the buds of gladness had burst their leaflet envelopes and swelled forth into flower. Deep happiness always leads love by the hand; and Firmian longed to-day, with an unutterable longing, to press his heart, all heavy with bliss, upon Lenette's breast, and there forget all his wants and hers.