"'O thou dear Germany!' (he cried and smote his hands together,) 'shall not then the whole country make a joke, except as the court decrees?' (Here Victor looked at the old, deaf coachman Zeusel; for every humorous effusion he regularly addressed to him who least understood it. I will here, however, have it addressed to the patricians and _membra_.) 'Is there, then, my dear man, nothing in the country but gallowses and carpenters and officers of justice, so that, I mean, the former cannot touch an axe, unless the latter have struck the first blow with it? Will you, then, get all follies, like fashions, from above downward, as a wind always roars in the upper regions of the atmosphere before it whistles down below at our windows?--And where, then, is there an imperial recess or a vicariate conclusion which forbids a German of the empire to play the fool? I hope, Zeusel, a time is yet to come when you and I and every one will have sense enough to have his own, and his own private folly, begotten of his flesh and blood, as Autodidact in all folly and wisdom.--O men, poor creatures! catch, I pray, at the wing and tail feathers of joy amidst the forced marches of your days! O ye poor creatures! will no good friend, then, scribble an imperial folio, and prove to you that, like the Devil in the Apocalypse, you have but a short time? Ah! enjoyment promises so little,--hope performs so little,--the mowing and planting days of joy stand in the Berlin Almanac so few in number,--if, now, you were absolutely so stupid as to put away and lay up whole hours and olympiads full of pleasure, like preserves in your cellar, in order, the Devil knows when, to come upon them as fifty or sixty entire pickled and salted years----I say, if you did not press out on the cluster of every hour the berry of each moment at least with some lemon-squeezers----what would come of it at last?... nothing but the moral to my first and last fable, which I once made in the presence of a Hanoverian.' ... "I wish the reader wanted it; for it runs thus: '_The Stupid Marmot_ is the title. The said marmot was once led by the full crop of a pigeon, the contents of which he was eating, to the prize question, whether it would not be better, if, instead of single grains of corn, he should rather bring in pigeons with whole corn magazines in their throats. He did so. On a long summer day, he arrested half a flock of pigeons with full crops. He slit open not a single crop, however, but, though hungry, saved all up for evening and morning: first, in order to catch a goodly lot of pigeons; secondly, to feast on the batch of corn thoroughly softened in the evening. At last, when evening came, he ripped open the crops of his tithe-officers, six, nine, all,--not a grain was any longer there; the prisoners had already digested all themselves, and the marmot had been as stupid as a miser.'" So far the Third and the Fortieth Dog-Post-Days.--Poor Victor!