The Bee-father went on to make no secret of it, that he formerly, before he procured this ring in Nuremberg on a court-day, had not been able to believe in the Trinity; "but now one must be a beast, if he could not comprehend it."--The morning before his departure, Victor was in a double embarrassment,--he was very desirous of having a present; secondly, of making one. What he wanted to have was a plump hour-watch,[138] won at a raffle where the ticket was twenty kreutzers. This piece of work, whose thick hand had measured off the thread of the old man's life on the dirty dial-plate in nothing but gay, joyous bee-hours, he wanted as a Laurence's-box,[139] an amulet, an Ignatius's-plate,[140] against hours of Saul. "A manual laborer," said he, "needs really only a little sun, to go warmly and contentedly through life; but we, with our fantasy, are often as badly off on the sunny side as on the stormy side,--man stands more firmly in mud than on ether and morning-redness." He wanted to press upon the acceptance of the happy veteran of life, as purchase-money for the hour-watch and prize-medal for his lodgings, his own watch that told the seconds. Lind had not the heart for it, but grew red. At last Victor represented to him that the second-watch was a good fire-ball[141] for the Trinity-ring, a thesis-image of that article of faith, for the _threefold_ hands made, after all, only _one_ hour.--Lind _swapped_. Victor could neither be the mocker nor the Bunclish[142] reformer of such an erring soul, and his sympathetic whimsicality is nothing but a doubting sigh over the human brain, which has its seventy _normal years_, and over life, which is an interim of faith, and over the theological doctors'-rings, which are just such Trinity-rings, and over the theological lecture-rooms and recitation-rooms, wherein just such second-telling watches indicate and strike. --At last he leaves Kussewitz at six o'clock in the morning. A very beautiful daughter of the Count of O---- did not come back until seven o'clock; that is fortunate for us all, for otherwise he would be still sitting there. The Dog-post-day is run out. I know not whether I should make an extra-leaf or not. The Intercalary Day is at the door; I will therefore let it be, and only insert a Pseudo-extra-leaf, which, as is well known, differs from a canonical merely in this,--that in the apocryphal I do not give notice by any superscription, but only slip off from the history in an underhand way to mere irrelevant things.