In the night nothing memorable occurred, except that he kept awake and listened in every direction to hear if something with a tail might not be stirring, because he was minded to vex himself to his heart's content. As there was no sign of the beasts to be detected, not so much as a side-leap, he got out and sat on the floor, and pressed his spy's-ear to that. As good luck would have it, just then the movements of the enemy with their ballets and gallopades burst upon his ear. He started up, armed himself with a child's drum, and woke his wife up with the whisper: "Sweet! go to sleep again, and don't be frightened in your sleep; I'm only drumming a little against the rats; for the Zwickau Collection of Useful Observations for Housekeepers in Town and Country, 1785, recommends this course." His first thunder-stroke gave his hereditary foes the repose which it snatched from his blood relations.... But as I have now put everybody into a condition to imagine the Chaplain in his shirt and with the cymbal of the soldiery, let us rather go to the bed of his son Flamin, and see what _he_ is doing therein. Nothing,--but out of it he is at this moment taking a ride at this late hour, and that, too, without saddle or waistcoat. He, whose bosom was a cave of Æolus, full of pent-up storms--(any discreet prothonotary in Wetzlar would have scraped his fish-head or partridge's-wing cleaner or brushed his velvet-knee cleaner than he)--could not possibly lie longer on his pillow,--he to whom a drum came so near to-night, and to-morrow a friend. Anybody else, of course (at least the reader and myself), in the midst of the transparent night wherewith April was closing, the wide stillness on which the drum-sticks fell, the longing for a loved one with whom to-morrow would again make whole a desolate heart and a dismembered life, would have been filled by all this with tender emotions and dreams;--its only effect on the Chaplain's son was to fling him on his nag and out into the night: his inward earthquakes could only be allayed by a bodily gallop. He flew up and down the hill, on which he would to-morrow reunite himself to his Horion, ten times. He cursed and thundered at all his passions--to be sure _with_ passion--which had hitherto laid the bone-saw to their hands linked in friendship. "Oh! when I once have thee again, Sebastian," he said, and twitched his nag round, "I will be so gentle, as gentle as thou, and never misconstrue thee; if I do, may the thunder--" Ashamed at his self-contradictory impetuosity, he rode merely at an ambling-pace home.