Nevertheless, in the morning the rejected one brought him his breakfast with downcast eyes and painfully smiling lips; he had heard in his bed how the apothecary and his hard sprouts of daughters had twitted Marie with her "doleful whining air," and therefrom inferred a "_refusal_ from the jesting gentleman" overhead. His soul bled within him, and at last he accepted Marie;--he made his eye and his voice so soft and sympathetic that he could have lent either to the most tender maiden; but Marie took nothing of it to herself. January could hardly wait for him to come again. The third day also it was just so. And so, too, the next week. --But I could wish my readers had all ridden in a body, at this time, through the Flachsenfingen gate, and that this learned company had scattered itself through the city in order to institute inquiries about our hero. The reading scouts sent by me to the coffee-houses would learn that the new English doctor had already unseated the old one,--helped the parson's son at St. Luna to the post of Regency-Counsellor,--and that great changes in all departments were at hand. The division which I distributed among the butlers, butchers, fishery-masters, castellans, and valets of the court, would bring me word that the Prince had patted the Doctor, not on the fingers, but on the shoulder,--that he had day before yesterday showed him with his own hand his picture-cabinet, and sent him the best piece out of it,--that in the theatre he had looked out with him from the stage-box,--that he had presented to him a snuff-box rich with jewels (the usual civic crown of rulers, and their calumet, as if we were Greenlanders, who never love to receive any other present so much as snuff),--and that they would travel together. Two of the very finest and most dignified readers whom I had detached from these columns, and of whom I had despatched the one to the Paullinum to the Princess, the other to the actual Minister, would at least report to me the news that Prince and Doctor had called together upon both, and that both had looked upon my hero as a singular, shy, taciturn Englishman, who owed everything to his father. But the last piece of news which the readers have related to me they cannot, I am sure, possibly know; and I will myself tell it to them.