you cheating old grey-headed vagabond? I suppose you are like the Heimlicher in Freyburg[18]--rather a different sort of man to you, it's to be hoped--and have half-a-dozen years or so, during which no one can lay hold of you--but I've got hold of you to-day, hypocrite! Mordax!" The dog looked up at this word of command. "Let him go, now," Siebenkæs begged, compassionating the prostrate sinner. "In a moment; but don't you put me in a fury, please," said Leibgeber, letting fall the plucked wig, standing on it, and taking out his scissors and black paper, "I want to be quite calm while I clip out a likeness of the padded countenance of this portentous cotton-nightcap of a creature, because I shall take it away with me as a _gage d'amour_. I want to carry this _ecce homunculus_ about with me half over the world, and say to everybody, 'Hit it, bang away at it well; blessed is he who doth not depart this life till he hath thrashed Heimlicher Blasius of Kuhschnappel; I would have done it myself if I had not been far too strong.' "I shan't be able," he went on, turning to Siebenkæs, and finishing a good portrait, "to give that sneak and sharper there an account by word of mouth of my success, for a whole year to come; but by that time the one or two little touches of abuse which I have just lightly applied to him will be covered by the statute of limitations, and we shall be as good friends as ever again." Here he unexpectedly requested Siebenkæs to stay by Saufinder--whom he had constituted into a corps of observation by a motion of his finger--as he was obliged to leave the room for a moment. On the last occasion of his being in Blaise's grand drawing-room (where he displayed his magnificence before the Kuhschnappel world, great and small), he had noticed the paper-hangings there, and an exceedingly ingenious stove, in the form of the goddess of justice, Themis, who does, indeed, singe as frequently as she merely warms. And this time he had brought with him a camel's-hair pencil, and a bottle of an ink made from cobalt dissolved in aquafortis, with a little muriatic acid dropped into it. Unlike the black cloth ink, which is visible at first and disappears afterwards, the sympathetic ink here spoken of is invisible at first, and only comes out a green colour on the paper when it is warmed. Leibgeber now wrote with his camel's-hair pencil and this ink the following invisible notification on the paper which was closest to the stove, or Themis. "The Goddess of Justice hereby protests in presence of this assembly against being thus set up in effigy, and warmed and cooled (if not absolutely hanged), at the pleasure of the Heimlicher von Blaise, who is long since condemned at her inner secret tribunal. "THEMIS."