The street choral service and the vocal serenades now commence. The blind sing like blinded singing-birds--better, but louder; the lame walk; the poor preach the gospel themselves; the deaf and dumb make a terrible noise, and ring in the feast with little bells--everybody sings his own tune in the middle of everybody else's--a paternoster is clattering at the door of every house, and in the rooms inside nobody can hear himself swear. Whole cabinets of small coppers are lavished on one hand, pocketed on the other. The one-legged soldiery spice their ejaculatory prayers with curses, and blaspheme horribly, because people don't give them enough--in brief, the borough which had made up its mind for a day's enjoyment, is invaded and almost taken by storm by the rabble of beggars. And now the maimed and the diseased begin to appear. Whoever has a wooden jury-leg under him, sets it and his long third leg and fellow-labourer the crutch, in motion towards Kuhschnappel, and drives and plants his sharp-pointed timber toe into moist earth there in the vicinity of the town-gate, in hopes of its thriving and bearing fruit. Whosoever has no arms or hands left, stretches both out for an alms. Those to whom Heaven has entrusted the beggars' talent, disease, above all paralysis, the beggars' _vapeurs_--trades with his talent, and the body appertaining to it, levying contributions with it on the whole and the sound. People who might stand as frontispieces to works on surgery and medicine, quite as appropriately as at city gates, take up their position near the latter and announce what they lack, which is, first and foremost, other people's cash. There are plenty of legs, noses, and arms in Kuhschnappel, but a great many more people. There is one most extraordinary fellow--(to be admired at a distance, though impossible to be equalled--looked upon with envy, though indeed only by such blotting-paper souls as can never see supreme excellence without longing to possess it); there's only half of him there, because the other half's in his grave already, everything you could call legs having been shot clean away; and these shots have placed him in a position at once to arrogate and assume to himself the primacy and generalship-in-chief of the cripples, and be drawn about on a triumphal car as a kind of demigod, whose soul, in place of a corporeal garment, has on merely a sort of cape and short doublet. "A soldier," said Siebenkæs, "who is still afflicted with one leg, and who on that ground expostulates with fate, inquiring of her, 'Why am _I_ not shot to pieces like that cripple, so that I might make as much in the day as he does?' seems to forget that on the other side of the question there are thousands of other warriors besides himself who haven't even _one_ wooden leg (let alone more), but are totally unprovided with even _that_ fire- and begging-certificate; moreover, that however many of his limbs he might have been relieved of by bullets, he might still