Bacon reckons the remembrances of childhood among wholesome, medicinal things; naturally enough, therefore, they acted like a salutary digestive on the Quintus. He could now again betake him with new heart to his desk, and produce something quite peculiar,--petitions for church livings. He took the Address-calendar, and, for every country parish that he found in it, got a petition in readiness; which he then laid aside, till such time as the present incumbent should decease. For Hukelum alone he did not solicit.--It is a pretty custom in Flachsenfingen, that, for every office which is vacant, you are required, if you want it, to sue. As the higher use of Prayer consists, not in its fulfilment, but in its accustoming you to pray; so likewise petitionary papers ought to be given in, not indeed that you may get the office,--this nothing but your money can do,--but that you may learn to write petitions. In truth, if, among the Calmucks, the turning of a calabash[45] stands in place of Prayer, a slight movement of the purse may be as much as if you supplicated in words. Towards evening--it was Sunday--he went out roving over the village; he pilgrimed to his old sporting-places, and to the common where he had so often driven his snails to pasture; visited the peasant who, from school-times upwards, had been wont, to the amazement of the rest, to _thou_[46] him; went, an Academic Tutor, to the Schoolmaster; then to the Senior; then to the Episcopal-barn or church. This last no mortal understands, till I explain it. The case was this. Some three-and-forty years ago a fire had destroyed the church (not the steeple), the parsonage, and, what was not to be replaced, the church-records. (For this reason it was only the smallest portion of the Hukelum people that knew exactly how old they were; and the memory of our Quintus himself vibrated between adopting the thirty-third year and the thirty-second.) In consequence, the preaching had now to be carried on where formerly there had been threshing; and the seed of the divine word to be turned over on the same threshing-floor with natural corn-seed. The Chanter and the School-boys took up the threshing-floor; the female mother-church-people stood on the one sheaves-loft, the Schadeck womankind on the other; and their husbands clustered pyramidically, like groschen and farthing-gallery men; about the barn-stairs; and far up on the straw-loft, mixed souls stood listening. A little flute was their organ, an upturned beer-cask their altar, round which they had to walk. I confess, I myself could have preached in such a place, not without humor. The Senior (at that time still a Junior), while the parsonage was building, dwelt and taught in the Castle; it was here, accordingly, that Fixlein had learned the _Irregular Verbs_ with Thiennette.