A man who, like Victor, construed three straight leagues into seven crooked ones, is often hungry, but certainly more so than he;--he took merely a Leibnitz's monad-meal out of his pocket, biscuit and wine, and appeased therewith the stomach which hung and drew upon his spirit, in order not to darken and foul, by throwing in any pieces of flesh, the clear lake of his inner being, with its reflected arch of heavenly blue and heavenly red. In fact, he hated gormandizers as men of too gross selfishness, as well as all living larders, where layers of fat crush in the spirit, as masses of snow do a house. The soul, he said, takes an odor from the contents of the body, just as wine does from the fruit which is near it in the cellar, and in the mephitic vapor in which the souls of the Flachsenfingenites bob up and down over the brew-kettles which seethe their potatoes and beer, the poor birds must surely fall down tipsy and stifled into this dead sea. He broke his biscuit not in any house, but in the skeleton, i. e. framework of a house, which had just come from the hands and axes of the carpenters into the sight of the village. As he looked through all the divisions and subdivisions of this architectural skeleton, and saw at once through sitting-room, kitchen, stable, and loft, he thought to himself: "Another play-house for a poor, little human troupe, who are here to play out their benefit comedy, their Gay's Beggars'-opera, with no voice to cry from the stage-box, _Encore!_ Ah! before these beams have blackened to ebony by the winter smoke, many an eye-socket will have grown red with grief; many a northwester of life will blow through the window upon trembling hearts, and into these nooks, which are yet to be darkly walled up, will many a back, sore with bruises from the warfare of common life, creep away to wipe off sweat or blood. But joy (he went on soliloquizing as he looked at the place for stove and table) will also set a gilliflower-tree or two before the window for your inmates, and drive up before your house-door, which is yet to be hung, and unload its freight of the three holy feasts, and the church fair, and the child's baptism.--Heavens! how foolish that I should prefer thinking all this in the mere ribs of a house to seeing it yonder in the walled-up houses of the village!" During this table-talk and house-warming-oration, whereat, however, no drinking-glass was shivered, the white breast of a swallow swooped low across the road, and her bill took up a load of slacked lime for her little garret. The wasp shaved off from the joist-work paper-shavings for the layers of her bulbous sphere. The spider had already knit her spider's house into the larger one. All creatures played the carpenter and mason in building up for themselves their little islands in the infinite sea; but grovelling man looks not over his shoulder, and sees not that all is like him.