On the way the chaplain sketched to himself a safe and sound plan of proceeding in the business. He would in the beginning make no disclosure of the engagement to Flamin,--then he was going to read to him only the penitential text upon the Maienthal duel,--then to extort from him the _Urphede_ or solemn oath to keep quiet,--and only at the very last to come out with the report. While he was thinking over the plan and the danger, he ran himself into a hotter and hotter sweat of anxiety. Just as he had once, by a long drawing out of consequences, driven himself and a patient who had a slight buzzing in the ears to such a pitch, that they both expected the next minute apoplexy and paralysis of half one side: so, in the present instance, by a picturesque treatment of the details of an _imaginary_ duel he at last removed from himself so thoroughly all doubts about one's having already _transpired_ that he passed in through the city gate with the firm conviction that the Regency-Councillor was lying either in chains or on the bier. "Thank God that I see thee without wounds and without chains," was the expression that escaped from him on his entrance; and he had almost spoiled his whole business plan, or at least reversed it. Flamin understood him to refer to the first duel. Eymann could so much the more easily follow out the management of the case and phlebotomical table of rules which he had laid down, and, so to speak, fight a duel with the duel. The silent son had nothing to oppose to him--but light beer. While he was getting it, the Parson had pulled at the knobs of all the canes to see whether there were no sword-canes. A pistol-like tinder-box at a distance was a suspicious object to him. A double-barrelled gun on the wall near by, with its--stock aimed at him, took away much of his courage. Flamin excused his taciturnity on the ground of legal _plethora_ and over-freighting of the brain, and pointed to the pile of criminal documents before him. When he was called upon to give him an extemporaneous abstract of them, and when of course the war-cries _prison_, _blood-guiltiness_, _avenging sword_, whizzed like a hissing rain of bullets round Eymann's ears; then did the agony which he aggravated by the more rapid _douche_ of the pale ale expand itself so mightily within him that the double-barrelled gun had to be hung up in the chamber: "I get nothing by it," said he, "if it goes off and bursts, and the lock flies into my face, or if the stock actually kills me." Now he began in a compound fit of emotion and intoxication to weep and to exhort: that a man ought to think on the fifth petition in the Lord's prayer,--that a country clergyman could with ill-grace preach to his spiritual fold reconciliation, if he had a son in the city, who during the sermon was fighting a duel,--and that Flamin must never say he was his son, if he either got or gave the fatal shot in a duel. Nothing so easily drew the storm-wind of Flamin's