These voyages of discovery completed, our Hukelum voyager could still, after evening prayers, pick leaf-insects, with Thiennette, from the roses; worms from the beds, and a Heaven of joy from every minute. Every dew-drop was colored as with oil of cloves and oil of gladness; every star was a sparkle from the sun of happiness; and in the closed heart of the maiden, there lay near to him, behind a little wall of separation, (as near to the Righteous man behind the thin wall of Life,) an outstretched blooming Paradise.... I mean, she loved him a little. He might have known it, perhaps. But to his compressed delight he gave freer vent, as he went to bed, by early recollections on the stair. For in his childhood he had been accustomed, by way of evening-prayer, to go over, under his coverlet, as it were, a rosary, including fourteen Bible Proverbs, the first verse of the Psalm, "All people that on Earth," the Tenth Commandment, and, lastly, a long blessing. To get the sooner done with it, he had used to begin his devotion, not only on the stair, but before leaving that place where Alexander studied men, and Semler stupid books. Moored in the haven of the down-waves, he was already over with his evening supplication; and could now, without further exertion, shut his eyes and plump into sleep.----Thus does there lurk, in the smallest _homunculus_, the model of--the Catholic Church. So far the Dog-days of Quintus Zebedäus Egidius Fixlein.--I, for the second time, close a Chapter of this _Life_, as Life itself is closed, with a sleep. THIRD LETTER-BOX. Christmas Recollections.--New Occurrence. For all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty, insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus, you regard your existence as a drum; this has only one single _tone_, but variety of _time_ gives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at his desk by night; and so lived on the usual monotonous fashion--all the time from the Holidays--till Christmas eve, 1791; and nothing was remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to paint.