It is only in accordance with German nature to make the fool the police-officer of the festival. The blow of his baton strikes the lord as well as the peasant boy, and his irony lashes the arrogant prince's son, and brings the colour into the cheeks of the most impudent. The sensitive pride of the _Junker_,--every offence to which, from a yeoman of the guard, would have been resented as a deadly affront,--unresistingly suffered the _pritschmeister_, in the exercise of his office, to seize and drag him to the place of punishment. But even the jests of the _pritschmeister_ are deserving of observation, for they are lasting; an endless variety of tricks and pleasantries, a definite hereditary art of being merry, typical forms of foolery many hundred years old; and they were earned on with a certain earnestness,--nay, even pedantry. Undoubtedly these stale tricks had their irresistible effect only when men were disposed to be in a merry humour, but their antiquity makes them to us like woodcuts, in the angular lines of which there lies a certain charm. When, for example, at the end of the shooting, the unfortunate shooter, who had won the last prize, received this prize,--a sow with six young ones,--from the _pritschmeister_, who wished him happiness, and calculated at length the increase of the porcine family in his house from year to year, and that he would after three years become master of 2401 head, the hearers of the joke were not the less amused because they had heard the same reckoning made ever since their childhood on similar occasions; for it acts like a melody, that exercises its greatest magic on the hearer when it has become familiar to him. The _pritschmeister_ knew well that it was his duty to be a fool. It is true, there were some proud fellows among them who were ashamed of their cap; but they were derided by their own companions. Thus in 1573, the _pritschmeister_ of Zwickau was serious and haughty; but he suffered for it under the contemptuous shrugging of the shoulders of his colleague, Benedict Edelbeck, who had wandered from Bohemia to the prize shooting, and knew better what became a _pritschmeister_. They bore also certain tokens of the fool,--the cap, and a striking variegated dress, in the colours of the city, which they kept as a festival present. At particularly distinguished shooting feasts they were very grandly attired; for example, at Coburg in 1614, there were five of them who wore the colours of the royal house,--yellow silk waistcoat, black hosen, yellow English stockings, long black and yellow knee ribands, beautiful Cordova shoes with silk ribands, a Spanish velvet hat with yellow feathers, a kasseke with loose sleeves, red, yellow, and black embroidery before and behind, with coats of arms; besides all this, the large club, and round the knee a string of bells, which rattled loud.