His bride also had, on former days, given sedulous assistance in this new improved edition of his house, and labored faithfully among the other furnishers and furbishers. But to-day she kept aloof; for she was too good to forget the maiden in the bride. Love, like men, dies oftener of excess than of hunger; it lives on love, but it resembles those Alpine flowers which feed themselves by _suction_ from the wet clouds, and die if you _besprinkle_ them. At length the Parson is settled, and of course he must--for I know my fair readers, who are bent on it as if they were bridemaids--without delay get married. But he may not; before Ascension-day there can nothing be done, and till then are full four weeks and a half. The matter was this. He wished in the first place to have the murder-Sunday, the Cantata, behind him; not indeed because he doubted of his earthly continuance, but because he would not (even for the bride's sake) that the slightest apprehension should mingle with these weeks of glory. The main reason was, he did not wish to marry till he were betrothed; which latter ceremony was appointed, with the Introduction Sermon, to take place next Sunday. It is the Cantata-Sunday. Let not the reader afflict himself with fears. Indeed, I should not have molested an enlightened century with this Sunday-_Wauwau_ at all, were it not that I delineate with such extreme fidelity. Fixlein himself--especially as the Quartermaster asked him if he was a baby--at last grew so sensible that he saw the folly of it; nay, he went so far that he committed a greater folly. For as dreaming that you die signifies, according to the exegetic _rule of false_, nothing else than long life and welfare, so did Fixlein easily infer that his death-imagination was just such a lucky dream; the rather as it was precisely on this Cantata-Sunday that Fortune had turned up her cornucopia over him, and at once showered down out of it a bride, a presentation, and a roll of ducats. Thus can Superstition imp its wings, let Chance favor it or not.