Come forth again, my Victor! I yearn for fairer souls than these foolish brothers have! None of us lives and reads on so carelessly as not to know in what biographical period of time we are living; it is, namely, eight days before Easter, when Zeusel is on the way to St. Luna.--Flamin disclosed to our Victor the joke upon the sick Zeusel. It displeased him altogether, just as writings like the _Anti-hypochondriac_, the _Vade-Mecum_,[24] or the oral retailers of printed jokes,--the stalest of all companions,--disgusted him. He could never set on a bearbaiting between two fools: only the sketch of such a battle-piece tickled his humor, but not the execution, just as he loved to read and imagine cudgelling-scenes in Smollett (the master in that line), but never cared to see them. Even of the incarnate bon-mots and hand-pointings at another's body he thought too disparagingly, which I, indeed, should be disposed to call dumb wit (just as there are dumb sins), and which are the true attic salt of small towns; for true wit, methinks, must, like Christianity, show itself, not in words, but in works. He looked upon our follies with a forgiving eye, with humoristic fantasies, and with the ever-recurring thought of the universal lunacy of man, and with melancholy conclusions. When he had once deducted the bad point, that Zeusel came bending before every nobleman as his hired beast, till the latter cudgelled him back, as in Paris one can hire lapdogs to go to walk with,--then the vanity of the man, especially as, in other cases, it was good-natured, indulgent, and often even witty, was something he had little to object to. No one tolerated vanity and pride more affectionately than he. "What does a man get by it, then," said he, much too spiritedly, "unless he is a fool, or where then shall he leave off being lowly? We must either think too well of ourselves, or not at all." Victor, therefore, with his sympathetic soul, paid at once a friendly and a professional visit to his landlord. This mood of his fell in grandly with the Apothecary's plan of securing the Doctor's influence against Mat. "For this I need nothing," said Zeusel to Zeusel, "except to let him see the intrigues which the Schleunes family is playing against him; for without me he is not _raffiné_ enough for that."