The Flachsenfingener knows that there is nothing in poets; and in books, where rills of verse run through the prose, he skips clean over the rills, just as certain people come late to church in order to escape the singing. He is a true servant of the state, who knows of what use the poetic golden vein is in the revision-, commission-, relation-, and enrolling-systems,--none at all; meanwhile, although he cannot appreciate a Klopstock or a Goethe, nevertheless he will not, in his leisure hours, despise a doggerel verse or crambo-rhyme. A soul of such a fortunate, robust nature, wherein one aims less to exalt his spirit than his income, makes it, to be sure, comprehensible how there may be a kine-pox, by means of which the Flachsenfingener has been able, like Socrates, to wander round alone in the plague of sentimentalism without being infected. The full moon produced with them full crabs, but no full hearts; and what they planted under it, that it might favor the growth, was not love, but--turnips. The genuine Little-Viennese shoots at much nearer targets than that white one over yonder. They marry there with true gusto, without having first shot themselves or sighed themselves to death,--they know no obstacles to love but ecclesiastical,--female virtue is a belt-buckle, which must hold as long as the surname of the daughter,--the hearts of daughters are there like letter-envelopes, which, when they have once been superscribed to one lord, can easily be turned so as to be addressed to another man,--the girls love there, not from coquetry, but from simplicity, any devil, except poor devils.... In short, my correspondent, from whom I have all this, is almost prepossessed in favor of Little Vienna, and therefore contradicts vehemently the author of the "Travelling Frenchman," who is said to have said somewhere--if I had him in the house, I should know how Little Vienna is properly named--that the Flachsenfingener has not energy enough to be at least a highwayman. Knef says, however, he will not give up the hope that they have been thieves, and backs himself by the cases of those that have been hung. _End of the Extra Fly-Leaf, wherein was sketched the Ridiculous Character of the People of Flachsenfingen,--or of the Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.