At last he came, and Victor drew a full breath again. The good youth often seeks, by acts of sacrifice, to reconcile his conscience again with his _thoughts_. With heart-beatings of enthusiasm he awaited the moment of solitude. A garden detaches and draws together people in the easiest manner, and only in such a place should one impart secrets; Victor could soon, in an arbor which wove itself on four chestnut-trees with its blooming vein-work nest-wise over their heads, embrace his father with trembling emotion, and speak and glow for his friend with tongue and heart. His Lordship's surprise was greater than _his_ emotion. "Here," said he, "is something which has long since fulfilled thy prayer in a different way; but I wished to reserve for thee the joy of bearing the message";--and therewith he gave him a most gracious autograph, wherein the Prince called the practising Advocate Flamin into the Administrative Council. A most gracious autograph is the _Tetragrammaton_[78] and means of grace, which works supernatural effects and state-miracles; and the illustrious writing-thumb is the magic thief's-thumb,[79] as it were, by which the different wheels of the state-repeating-watch--the lever-wheel, the face-wheel, often merely the hand--is shoved forward or backward, according as it desires an hour earlier or later. Hence ministers often climb up and cut off for themselves such a thief's-thumb to carry in their pockets. Sebastian is seized by joy, as by Habakkuk's angel, by the hair of the head, and carried through the garden, and driven with his news to the first he might meet, and that proved to be the Chaplain, who, with a comic face, swore it was all a fib of Victor's; but his restrained jubilation almost burst his compressed veins. Victor had no time for refutation, but hurried off with such a message to the heart to which it rightly belonged,--the mother's. The mother could not shape her mouth to anything but a blessed smile, into which the drops of joy overflowed from her eyes. No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child. But the son, in whose soul, such as it was to-day, this sunbeam of fate was really needed, could not, in the surprise, be immediately found.