the tail when its sinews are cut. If the Pharisees carried lead in their caps in order to make it easier for them to stoop,[148] the lead which one brings into the world with him, and which lies in the head, renders perhaps still greater services. Hence it is a fine arrangement, that great souls, for which, as for tall statures, stooping is disagreeable, fortunately (but for their punishment) never come to anything, whereas mediocre ones, who make nothing of it, flourish and put forth a goodly crown: thus have I often seen in the baking of bread, that every moderate loaf in the oven rose and arched beautifully, but the big one remained sitting there flat and miserable.--But we should be subjects for pity, if a virtue which constitutes the worth of the civilian, the virtue of becoming not merely like children, but like fœtuses, which double themselves up in the mother's body,--if this could only prosper in the highest place, as one must almost suppose, since the courtier _after_ the fall goes upright again on his estate,--whereas the serpent _before_ the fall and during the temptation did not creep.--But in all civil relations educational institutions for _crooklings_ are provided; everywhere there stretches out in the air now a spiritual and now a secular arm, which gives us the regular crook, and still higher are the longest of all set, which reach over whole nations. The scholar himself bends over his writing-desk under the birth of introductions and courtly dedications and opinions. By the mere hoariness of old age the body as well as the spirit ripens to a bony humpback, and the lower clergy, because they are always looking downward into the grave, work themselves into the crooked posture.--I conclude with the consolation that bending does not _exclude_ inflation, but _includes_ it; just as the circle, of which one is a section, runs innumerable times around the swollen surface of the sphere.... I would truly have written over this "Extra-leaf" that title as a heading,--so that the reader might have skipped it,--had I not wished that he should read it, by way of diverting himself, and of sharing more easily with my Victor his dismal hours. For every stroke of the clock is a death-bell sounding out a dead march for the wreck of his fairer hours. The very evening he entered into Flachsenfingen, stories quite as ugly as probable came to his ears; Mat had told the Apothecary a good deal; but this time I give in to his reports.