As the Intercalary Day this time falls in with the Preface, and as it begins, too, with the letter V,[47] both indeed can, with uncommon felicity, be despatched together. SEVENTH INTERCALARY DAY. End of the Register of Extra-Shoots. U. V. Unfeelingness of Readers.--Vol. III. (Preface to.) There were once happy times, when one had nothing to suffer from his fellow-savage and neighbor, except being struck dead,--when the hail was the only knout-master of the skin, whereas now the trade-wind of the visiting-fan is to us a whirlwind, and the cool breath over the teacup a sea-breeze,--when one took less interest in another's trouble than in his fodder,--when the ladies never wounded the gentlemen in bear-skins in any way (least of all with glances, charms, tresses), except with clubs, and when, to be sure, they possessed themselves, as well as to-day and to-morrow, of the heart of an honest man, but only in this way, by first stretching out the proprietor of it on an altar and regularly slaughtering him, before they cut out the heavenly globe from his chest. These times we have now all forfeited; in those which are upon us, things look badly. By heaven! one really needs not much less than everything to make him happy, and little more than nothing to make him unhappy,--for the former he requires a sun, for the latter a particle of sun-dust! We should be well off, and have the key to large apartments in all pleasure-castles, if fate had provided for us that we should endure, say as many degrees of torture as the Jurists have, namely, three,--no more plagues than the Egyptians underwent, namely, seven,--no more persecutions than the first Christians stood out, namely, ten. But for such drawings of fortune a man of sense does not look; at least, no one promises himself such prizes, who like me sits down and considers our humming-bird stomachs,--our soft caterpillar skins,--our ears tingling of themselves,--our eyes which are their own tinder,--and our _culs de Paris_, which can be pierced, not by a crumpled rose-leaf, but by the very shadow of a thorn,--and our fine complexion, which without a moon-umbrella would blacken in the moonlight.... And yet in this account of our troubles,--because I am diligently intent upon lessening them,--I have not included other quite different, most accursed items, but have left out riches, e. g., entirely, that smart-money for so many thousand gashes and fractures of the breast, and in fact millions of wounds which would make our riddled self absolutely transparent, were it not fortunately clothed from head to foot in English court-plaster.... But I left out all such stuff, because I knew it would after all amount to nothing, if I should set it off against a quite different purgatory and tempest into which we male-kind particularly are thrown, if we are so unfortunate as to