In three minutes the readers and I will go into the apothecary's shop to our hero, when we have waited only to be first informed that, as the riderless, bloody nag of the Chamberlain and the three twins with the lying Job's tidings of the murder came up to the window of the parsonage, the Court Chaplain was lathered and half shaved. He had therefore to sit still, and only say slowly under the razor: "O sorrow above all sorrows!--pray shave quicker, dear Mr. Surgeon,--wife, howl for me!" He waved his hand loosely in his suppressed agony, in order not to shake his arm and chin: "For God's sake, can't you scrape more speedily?--You have a poor Job under the razor,--it is my last beard,--they will march me and my household off to prison.--Thou unnatural child, thy father may be decapitated for thy sake, you Cain, you!" He ran to every window: "God have mercy on us! the whole parish has by this time got wind of it.--Dost thou see, wife, what a Satan we have together brought up and borne: it is thy fault.--What is the fellow listening there for? Shear off to your customers, Mr. Shearer, and don't go to blackening your spiritual shepherd anywhere, nor spread the news about."----At this moment came the gentle Clotilda, downcast and with her handkerchief in her hand, because she guessed what the heart of a disconsolate mother needed; namely, two loving arms as a band around the shattered breast, and a thousand balsam-drops of another's tears upon the splintered and swelling heart. She went up to the mother with open arms, and enfolded her therein with speechless weeping. The whimsical Parson fell at her feet and cried: "Mercy, mercy! none of us knew a word about it. I only heard of the murder just now while in the hands of the barber. I lament only for your sainted father and his relicts.--Who could have said ten years ago, good lady, that I should have raised a scamp that would shoot down my master and patron? I am a ruined man, and my wife too. I can no longer now for shame be _Senior Consistorii_.--I can send off no christening paper and present to his Highness, even though my wife should be taken in labor on the spot.--And if they behead my son, it will bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave."--When Clotilda, without smiling, assured him, on her sacred word, that there was an infallible way of rescue,--by which she meant Flamin's princely extraction,--then the Chaplain looked on her with sparkling eyes and dumfounded mien, and kept calling her half aloud at intervals, "Angel of heaven!--Angel of God!--Archangel!"--But the two female friends retired eagerly into a cabinet; and here Clotilda poured the first vulnerary water into the widely rent soul of the mother, by asseverating and pledging the intervention of a redeeming mystery, and concerting with her on that account the journey to London.--This withdrawal was partly also wrung from her by her false position with the Chamberlain's lady, whose last