I have not the courage to guess why the Princess should have given the watch with the enclosure which she (even by the showing of her conversation with Tostato) must have read, into the hands of Joachime; but to the suspicious knaves whom I thought of when writing the chapter of her eye-bandaging and kiss, this is a windfall: the present of the watch confirms them entirely in their knavish creed; for they can now--despite all my efforts to the contrary--allege the gift as a sign of the Italian revenge which Agnola had proposed to herself to take upon her rival Joachime (to whom she must needs ascribe Victor's resistance) in the fact of communicating to her his declarations of love in other quarters. Victor proposed to himself, as he took the greatest physical strides homeward, to take similar politic ones, and to confess plumply to the Prince: "It is not much over nine months since I troubled your Illustrious Highness's bride with a flimsy declaration of love, which she certainly cannot have ever read, and which now changes hands." But at present the opening of the affair of the watch-letter was impracticable: January was a little vexed at Clotilda's withdrawal; Victor had also for some time been less about him than usual, which certainly with an honest favorite ought not to be so, as, e. g., the famous Count von Brühel[56] watched, like a mother, around his master from morn to midnight. January seemed in this loneliness to think more of his children, and Victor had no tidings to impart to him from his Lordship. The main thing, moreover, was his spring sickliness, which made him again the credulous disciple of Dr. Culpepper and the gout. This doctor's trunk under a doctor's hat, whose brain-fibres were twisted to bass-strings, extolled his simplicities, merely by the solemn pomposity with which he delivered himself of them, beyond their value; of certain persons, e. g. physicians, financiers, economical-agents, even people of fine manners require stiff ones, and make more account of a pointed wig than of a hair-bag as big as a buckle or a Titus's-head.[57] Sebastian appeared to people much too waggish to allow them to think that he had learned anything. In the article of physicians--as in every main article of property or of life--the most distinguished vulgar think as the lowest, and prize men and lapdogs according to shaggy wildness of exterior. Besides, Victor had the fault of bringing himself and the physicians under suspicion of a thirst for glory, in that he praised them outright; e. g. "By their impressment of sailors and dead men they were a sort of buyers-up of souls for the next world, and served for nut-crackers to the good angels, who desired the kernel without the bodily shell, in order to transplant it. How often do we not obviate," he continued, "the most dangerous _transfers of maladies_ by an easy _transfer_ of the patient? I might appeal to the _refugiés_ from this world, whether our