O, this contentment with the evening-clouds of life refreshes the hypochondriacal hearer and spectator, whose melancholy strings in an old man's presence begin so easily to tremble like a death-watch; and an ardent old man seems to us an immortal being, hardened against the scythe of death, and a finger-post pointing to the next world! Victor especially saw, with heavy thoughts, in an old man, an organized past, a bent incarnation of years, the plaster cast of his own mummy standing before him. Every childish, forgetful, petrified old man reminded him of the masters of forges, who in their old age, like the human soul, have to undergo a crab-like promotion, and on account of their usual loss of sight become casters again,--then head smiths,--then foundery apprentices. The good Newton,[115] Linnæus, Swift, went back to be foundery-apprentices of learning. But so singularly timid is man, that, while he regards his soul, in its greatest _advantageous_ dependence upon his organs, still as a _vowel_,--and justly,--nevertheless, in the case of an _injurious_ dependence upon the same, fears it may be merely a _consonant_ of the body,--and _that_ unjustly. As a walk about a strange place gives a traveller the best naturalization act, and as Victor was incapable of being anywhere a stranger, he went--out a little way. There are many nights when it is not night. He saw outside, not far from the garden-fence of the senior (not the seignior of nobility, but the senior parson), a very beautiful girl sitting, buried in a Latin Whitsuntide programme, and praying from it with folded hands. A case of beauty and craziness united he never could resist; he greeted her, and would not let her roll up and put up her Latin prayer-book. The good soul, having lost her prayer-book and paternoster, had easily despatched her devotions out of the Whitsuntide programme _De Chalifis literarum studiosis_, as she neither understood Latin nor how to read, and looked upon the folding of the hands as a Masonic finger-speech, which would be readily understood in the _higher places_. She unrolled from a paper a sixth finger which had been cut off, and said the cloister of Mary in Flachsenfingen, on whose mother of God her father had wished to hang it as a thank-offering, would not accept it, because it was not made of silver. As Buffon ascribes to man's fingers the clearness of his ideas, so that the thoughts may be dissected at the same time with the hand, it follows that one who has a _sext_[116] of fingers, must think 1/6 or 1/11 the more clearly; and such a one, with such a supernumerary writing-finger, could do more in the sciences than we with the whole hand.