In the first place, the Conrector searched out and sorted all the Consistorial and Councillor quittances, or rather the toll-bills of the road-money, which he had been obliged to pay before the toll-gates at the Quintusship and Conrectorship had been thrown open; for the executor of the Schadeck testament had to reimburse him the whole, as his discharge would express it, "to penny and farthing." Another would have summed up his post-excise much more readily; by merely looking what he--owed; as these debt-bills and those toll-bills, like parallel passages, elucidate and confirm each other. But in Fixlein's case, there was a small circumstance of peculiarity at work, which I cannot explain till after what follows. It grieved him a little that for his two offices he had been obliged to pay and to borrow no larger a sum than 135 florins, 41 kreuzers, and one halfpenny. The legacy, it is true, was to pass directly from the hands of the testamentary executor into those of the Regiments-Quartermaster; but yet he could have liked well had he--for man is a fool from the very foundation of him--had more to pay, and therefore to inherit. The whole Conrectorate he had, by a slight deposit of 90 florins, plucked, as it were, from the Wheel of Fortune; and so small a sum must surprise my reader; but what will he say, when I tell him that there are countries where the entry-money into school-rooms is even more moderate? In Scherau, a Conrector is charged only 88 florins, and perhaps he may have an income triple of this sum. Not to speak of Saxony (what, in truth, was to be expected from the cradle of the Reformation, in Religion and Polite Literature), where a schoolmaster and a parson have _nothing_ to pay,--even in Baireuth, for example, in Hof, the progress of improvement has been such that a Quartus,--a Quartus, do I say,--a Tertius--a Tertius, do I say,--a Conrector,--at entrance on his post, is not required to pay down more than:-- Fl.rhen. Kr.rhen. 30 49 For taking the oaths at the Consistorium. 4 0 To the Syndic for the Presentation. 2 0 To the then Burgermeister. 45 7½ For the Government-sanction. --------------- Total, 81 fl. 56½ kr.