"She is good, indeed; she is gentle, and quiet, and patient, and only too industrious. If the whole tag, rag and bobtail of Hell's army, in the shape of the Venner, had only not advanced upon our little summer-house of happiness, to knock its roof off, we should have lived happy in it for many a day, Mr. Stiefel, far into the winter of our lives. For my Lenette is good, and _too_ good for me and for many another man." Here Stiefel, in his emotion, surrounded that hand of hers which had the skein of thread in it, at the seat of the pulse with his fine fingers--the empty hand being in her husband's possession--and the Wound Water of our pain, the great drops of which trickled from her drooped eyes down her cheeks, where her imprisoned hands could not wipe them away, made the two male hearts very tender. And besides, her husband could never praise any one long without his eyes overflowing. He went on, faster, "Yes, she might have been very comfortable and well-off with me, but that my mother's money is kept back from me in this terrible way. But, even for all that, I should have made her happy without the money, and she me--we never had a word, never a single unhappy moment--now had we, Lenette? nothing but peace and love, till the Venner came. He has taken a good deal from _us_!" The Schulrath raised his clenched fist in wrath, and exclaimed, sawing the air with it, "You child of hell! you robber-captain and filibuster! You silken Catiline and mischief-maker! Does it ever strike you that you'll have to answer for this and your other pranks one day? Mr. Siebenkæs, this, at all events, I _do_ expect of you, that if ever he comes here again asking for hair, you will turn him out by the hair of his own head, or hit this fur-maggot (as you call him yourself) across the shoulders with a boot-jack, and squeeze his hand with a pair of pincers--in fact, the long and the short of it is, _I will not_ have him come here any more."