You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this superstition with a nobler one; she had purposely stood farther back at the marriage-altar, and in the bridal-night fallen sooner asleep than he; thereby--as is the popular belief--so to order it that she might also die sooner. Nay, she has determined, if he die, to lay with his corpse a piece of her apparel, that so she may descend the sooner to keep him company in his narrow house. Thou good, thou faithful wife, but thou unhappy one!-- CHAPTER LAST. I have left Hukelum, and my gossip his bed; and the one is as sound as the other. The cure was as foolish as the malady. It first occurred to me, that, as Boerhaave used to remedy convulsions by convulsions, one fancy might in my gossip's case be remedied by another; namely, by the fancy that he was yet no man of thirty-two, but only a man of six or nine. Deliriums are dreams not encircled by sleep; and all dreams transport us back into youth, why not deliriums too? I accordingly directed every one to leave the patient; only his mother, while the fiercest meteors were darting, hissing before his fevered soul, was to sit down by him alone, and speak to him as if he were a child of eight years. The bed-mirror also I directed her to cover. She did so; she spoke to him as if he had the small-pox fever; and when he cried, "Death is standing with two-and-thirty pointed teeth before me, to eat my heart," she said to him, "Little dear, I will give thee thy roller-hat, and thy copy-book, and thy case, and thy hussar-cloak again, and more too if thou wilt be good." A reasonable speech he would have taken up and heeded much less than he did this foolish one. At last she said,--for to women in the depth of sorrow dissimulation becomes easy,--"Well, I will try it this once, and give thee thy playthings; but do the like again, thou rogue, and roll thyself about in the bed so, with the smallpox on thee!" And with this, from her full apron she shook out on the bed the whole stock of playthings and dressing-ware, which I had found in the press of the drowned brother. First of all his copy-book, where Egidius in his eighth year had put down his name, which he necessarily recognized as his own handwriting; then the black velvet _fall-hat_ or roller-cap; then the red and white leading-strings; his knife-case, with a little pamphlet of tin leaves; his green hussar-cloak, with its stiff facings; and a whole _orbis pictus_ or _fictus_ of Nürnberg puppets....