Now again to our history! The Councillor Heads of the Firm had conferred the Conrectorate on my hero, not only with a view to the continued consumpt of candles and beans, but also on the strength of a quite mad notion: they believed the Quintus would very soon die. --And here I have reached a most important circumstance in this History, and one into which I have yet let no mortal look; now, however, it no longer depends on my will whether I shall shove aside the folding-screen from it or not; but I must positively lay it open, nay, hang a reverberating-lamp over it. In medical history, it is a well-known fact, that in certain families the people all die precisely at the same age, just as in these families they are all born at the same age (of nine months); nay, from Voltaire, I recollect one family, the members of which at the same age all killed themselves. Now, in the Fixleinic lineage, it was the custom that the male ascendants uniformly on Cantata-Sunday, in their thirty-second year, took to bed and died; every one of my readers would do well to insert in his copy of the _Thirty Years' War_, Schiller having entirely omitted it, the fact, that, in the course thereof, one Fixlein died of the plague, another of hunger, another of a musket-bullet; all in their thirty-second year. True Philosophy explains the matter thus: "The first two or three times, it happened purely by accident; and the other times, the people died of sheer fright: if not so, the whole fact is rather to be questioned."