"Why not?" said Friedrich; "do I look as if I were joking?" "What?" cried Besserdich; "An old beggar like you want to marry a Bailiff's daughter! _My_ daughter! A young girl of eighteen!" "Mind what you're saying. Bailiff," said Fritz. "Old, say you? Just look at me, I am in my prime,--between twenty and fifty. A beggar, say you? I have never asked you for so much as a pipe of tobacco. It's true your Hanchen is, on the whole, younger than I am, but I don't object to that. I'll take her all the same, for she is clever, and knows that a fellow like me who has seen the world, is worth more than one of your young peasants with red cheeks and flaxen hair, who makes a bow like a clasp-knife and spits about in folk's rooms." "Have you been putting these notions in the girl's head?" shouted the Bailiff, raising his stick against him. "Put down your stick, Bailiff," said Friedrich; "what would people say if they heard that I had been fighting with my father-in-law, in the open country, before the wedding?" The Bailiff let his stick drop. "No, I could take a sausage from a fellow like the Bullfinch," Friedrich went on; "but I could not cheat a pretty, young thing like that of her happiness; I put no notions into your Hanchen's head." The Bailiff looked at him out of the corner of his eye as if he would say, "The Devil may trust you!" but he said nothing. They now went on again,--but the egg was broken. When they arrived at Demzin, Friedrich went up to a young clerk who was standing near them and said: "I beg your pardon, have you seen a Frenchman pass by?" And so on, and so on. The young man said yes; that rather less than an hour before, such a fellow had passed. They walked through the village, and, at the other end an old woman had also seen the Chasseur. "We shall soon have him now," said Friedrich. But a little further on they met, in the fields, an old man who was cutting willows near the path and he knew nothing of any Frenchman, and said the fellow had not passed since six o'clock in the morning. What vas to be done now? Follow the road straight on? That would be a regular wild-goose chase. But the fellow had certainly gone out of the village; where had he stopped? The Bailiff scratched his head; Friedrich looked all round and surveyed the country. At last he said;--"We can go no further, Bailiff; the trace is at an end here; so we must think the matter over. But the wind is cold, let us go and sit down by that oven yonder."[4] Well, they did so. "What a fool I was," said the Bailiff, "to go running after a Frenchman in this weather!" "Father-in-law, leave the Frenchman alone," said Friedrich; "we shall get him yet." "Are you going to begin again with your 'fathers-in-law,' you Prussian knave?" "What you are not, you may become. Bailiff.--I have known many people who have given their daughters and plenty of money into the bargain, for that name." "Yes, but then they got rather different sons-in-law."