It was, namely, just before the first of April--many have three hundred and sixty-five first of April's every year--when the page made the apothecary an April fool.[13] In St. Luna three bathing and drinking visitors had already arrived, three wild young Englishmen, who announced themselves as _tergemini_, but were probably only brothers born in succession, not at once. Only their souls seemed three twins of the spirit of freedom and fraternity; they were so republican, that they did not even appear at court, and, like every Englishman, accounted us all, me and the reader and the Professor of Eloquence, as Christian slaves, and the enfranchised as turnkeys' assistants. The magic influence of a congenial heart soon drew the Regency-Councillor Flamin into their Cartesian vortex; they had hardly been there eight days, when they had held with him a club at the Chaplain's. He promised them for Easter a sight of their countryman Sebastian; and the noble Matthieu he had at the very beginning brought with him. Mat's liberty-tree was merely a satirical thorn-bush; his satires supplied the place of principles. Only a single one of the three twins, whom the very evil one with horns and buck's feet,--namely, the Satyr[14]--rode, could properly like the biting _Evangelist_ and false _Apostle_ of liberty; for in a clear, bright head every word of wit and lightning from another, assumes a greater lustre, as glowworms gleam brighter in dephlogisticated gas. When Matthieu saw the parsonage coachman and the hired lackey of the Englishmen, the bellows-blower Zeusel,--the twin-brother of the Apothecary,--he devised something which I will presently relate. The Apothecary was notoriously obliged to be ashamed of his veritable brother, because he was a mere bellows-blower, and raised no other wind than musical,--and because, furthermore, he had bad inner ears, and, as to outer ones, none at all. Nevertheless, as respects the latter he had protected himself with a judicial certificate which stated, to his credit, that he had lost his acoustic volutes in an honorable way by a surgeon who undertook to help his difficulty of hearing. But his head was his ear. If he held a staff in contact with the speaker or his seat, or if one preached directly over his head, he heard very well. Haller relates similar examples, e. g. of a deaf person who always thrust a long stick against the pulpit as conductor and bridge of devotion. His deafness, which called him rather to the post of a highest state servant than to that of a hired servant, was the very thing which secured him the victory over the competitors, because Cato the elder--so the jolly Englishman styled himself--was pleased with the fellow's droll posture.