There is wittier and more audacious invention in the tale, _The Latest Adventures of the Dog Berganza_. In the first place, we are left uncertain whether the dog is a metamorphosed human being or not; he himself says: "It is possible that I am really Montiel, who was punished by being compelled to assume the shape of a dog; if so, the punishment has been a source of pleasure and amusement." In the second place, even the dog, as dog, sees himself duplicated, and is conscious of the dissolution of the unity of his being. "Sometimes I actually saw myself lying in front of myself like another Berganza, another which yet was myself; and I, Berganza, saw another Berganza maltreated by the witches, and growled and barked at him." Still greater is the audacity, still more extravagant the whimsicality in the tale of _The Golden Jar_. In it an ugly old Dresden apple-woman is at the same time the beautiful bronze knocker on Registrar Lindhorst's door. The metal face of the door-knocker occasionally wrinkles itself up into the old crone's crabbed smile. In addition to this, she is the odious fortune-teller, Frau Rauerin, and good old Lise, the fond nurse of the young heroine of the tale. She can (like the fortune-teller in _Der Doppelgänger_) suddenly change dress, shape, and features. When the matter of her parentage is cleared up, we learn that her papa was a "shabby feather broom," made of feathers from a dragon's wing, while her mamma was "a miserable beetroot." Lindhorst, the stolid Registrar, who never seems to feel at home except when sitting in his library in his flowered dressing-gown, surrounded by old manuscripts, is also a great magician, who, in the middle of an ordinary conversation, suddenly begins to relate the most insane occurrences as if they were the most natural in the world. He tells, for instance, that he was once invisibly present at a party--quite a simple matter--he was in the punch-bowl. On another occasion he takes off his dressing-gown, steps without more ado into a bowl of blazing arrack, vanishes in the flames, and allows himself to be drunk. In creating these doubled and trebled existences, the character, for instance, of the Archive Keeper, who is a Registrar by day and a salamander at night, Hoffmann obviously had in his mind the strange contrast between his own official life, as the conscientious criminal judge, severely rejecting all considerations of sentiment or æstheticism, and his free night life as king of the boundless realm of imagination--a life in which reality, as such, had no part.