Furboots came, as if he had been sent for, on the Saturday evening, like a Jewish Sabbath. I have often seen a guest serve as cement or hefting powder to two better halves in a state of fracture, because shame and necessity compelled them to speak and behave kindly to each other, at all events while the guest was there. Every husband should be provided with two or three visitors of this sort, to come in when he's suffering from an attack of wife-possessed-too-long-with-the-devil-of-dumbness; as long as the people are there, at all events, she must speak, and take the iron thief-apple of silence--which grows on the same stalk as the apple of discord--out of her mouth. The Schulrath stood up before Lenette Wendeline as if she were one of his school girls, and asked her if she had borne this first cross of her married life patiently, and like a worthy sister in suffering of the patriarch Job. She drooped her big eyes, wound a thread the length of a finger into a white snowball, and breathed deeper. Her husband answered for her: "I was her brother in affliction, and bore the cross-bar of the burden--I without a murmur, she without a murmur. In the twelfth century, the heap of ashes on which Job endured his sufferings used still to be shown. Our two chairs are our heaps of ashes; there they are still to be seen!" "Good woman!" said Stiefel, in the softest pianissimo of his pedal reed-stop of a masculine voice, and laid his snow-white hand on the soft, raven hair upon her forehead. Siebenkæs heard a multiplying sympathetic echo of these words in his heart, and laid his arm on Lenette's shoulders, who was blushing with pleasure at the honour conferred upon her by this kindness of the man in office. Her husband softly pressed her left side to his right, and said:--