As princes feel no pressure of the atmosphere, except that of the air which is in their bodies, January's gratitude for his deliverance from this pressure, was so unbounded that for the whole day he would not let the Doctor go from his side. He must dine,--sup,--ride,--play with him. In the palace it was tolerable; it was not like Nero's, a city within a city, a Flachsenfingen in Flachsenfingen, but merely barracks and a kitchen full of soldiers and cooks. For before every mouldy archive, before every room where lay genuine diamonds, before every door-lock, and before every stairway a bayonet was planted, with the protector and patron who was attached to it. The numerous crew of kitchen-servants lived and fired up in the palace, because his Highness was continually eating. By this continual eating he would make his fasting easier for him; for at the three ritual mealtimes of men he touched--because Culpepper would so have it--desperately little, and could not wholly contradict the courtiers who praised his strict diet. A watchmaker from London had done the most to help him out in this moderation by contriving for him a servant's bell, and a spring-work whose index stood upon a great dial-plate in the servants' apartment; the margin of the dial-plate was encircled, instead of the hours and the days of the month, with the names of viands and wines. January had only to ring the bell and press the spring, and the household immediately knew whether the tongue and the victual-index pointed to pastry or to Burgundy. In this way, by tinkling like a mill when his inner man had nothing more to grind, he was most easily enabled to observe a stricter diet than physicians and moralists could well demand, and he shamed more than one grandee, whom, after eviscerating in death, they were obliged to lay out upon the bed of state with the hungry stomach under one arm and the thirsty liver under the other, as they give to capons also their two viscera as a body-guard between their two wings.