And yet people cannot well bear men who are the fifth wheel of a coach; but every baggage-wagon has a fifth wheel strapped on behind it, and in case of accident this is a true _wheel of fortune_. Reinhold read Kant's Critique through _five times_ before he understood it. I pledge myself to be more intelligible to him, and require to be read only half as often. To speak out freely, I cherish some contempt for a head full of elastic ideas, which jump with their spring-feet from one cerebral chamber to another; for I find no difference between them and the elastic worms in the intestines, which Götze saw, before a light, leap to the height of three inches. Of course the following thought does not rightly hang together with the foregoing chain of conclusions and flowers; namely, that I am afraid of finding imitators, and so much the more as I am, here, myself, one of a certain class of witty authors. In Germany no great author can light a new torch, and hold it out into the world till he is tired and throws away the fag-end of it, without the little ones immediately pouncing upon it, and running round and shining round for half-years longer with the little end of a light. Thus have I (and others) in Ratisbon been run after a thousand times by the boys, who held in their hands remnants of wax-torches which the ambassadorial retinue had thrown away, and offered to light me to my landlord's for a few kreutzers ... _Stultis sat!_[119] In the morning Victor hastened to the palace. He got a tradesman's dress and the shop. At ten o'clock came on the "transfer" of the Princess. The three apartments in which it was to take place stood, with their folding doors, opposite to his shop. He had never yet seen the Princess--except all night in his dreams, and he can hardly wait for it all.... Nor the reader either: does he not even now snuff his candle and his nose,--fill up pipe and glass,--change his position, if he rides upon a so-called _reading-ass_,[120]--press the book smoothly open, and say with uncommon delight, "I am somewhat sharp-set for that description!"--I verily, am not at all; I feel as if I were to be shot with arquebuses. Positively! an infantry-soldier who in midwinter storms a hostile wall of the thickest paper, in the opera, has his heaven on earth, compared with a mining-superintendent of my stamp.