keep on asking, 'Why not more?'" Siebenkæs was merry over the poor because they are merry over themselves; and he never would kick up a politico-economical row about their occasionally tippling and guzzling a little too much,--when, for instance, a whole lazarette-wagon, or ambulance-load of them, halting at some shepherd's hut, they get down, and go in, and their plasters, their martyrs' crowns, their spiked girdles and hair-shirts come off, leaving nothing but a brisk human being who has left off sighing just for a minute; or--since what everybody works for is, not merely to live, but to live a little better now and then--when the beggar too has something a little better than his everyday fare, and when the cripple pulls the goddess of joy into his boarded dancing-barn to dance with him as his partner, and her hot mask falls off in the waltz (as for _our_ ball-rooms, it never falls off in them). About 11 o'clock, the devil, as I have half hinted already, dropped a handful of blue-bottle flies into Firmian's wedding soup--to wit, Herr Rosa von Meyern, who graciously intimated his aristocratic intention of coming to call that afternoon, "because there was such a good view of the market-place." People of impecunious gentility, who can't issue orders in any houses but their own, construct _in_ their own, with much ease, loopholes whence they can fire upon the enemy who makes his attack from--within. The advocate had a piece of rudeness towards the Venner to put into either scale of his balance of justice, so as to determine which was the least of the two. The one was, to let him be told he might stay where he was; the other, to let him in, and then behave just as though the noodle were up in the moon. Siebenkæs chose the latter as the smaller. Women, good souls, have always to carry and hold up the Jacob's ladder by which the male sex mount into the blue æther and into the evening-red; this call of the Venner came as an extra freight loaded on to Lenette's two burden-poles of arms. The laving of all moveable property, and the aspersion of all immoveable, recommenced. Meyern, the false lover of the poor child-murderess, Lenette detested with all her heart; at the same time, all her polishing machinery was at once set agoing on the room, indeed, I think women dress themselves more and with greater pains for their lady-enemies than for their lady-friends.