"Thunder! This won't do--it's ridiculous! Me bringing women-creatures into the world! Really, my dear ... and such a little vixen as that!" Yet he had himself a red brush of hair on top of his head and a thick, fair moustache. "Oh, it's too absurd," he said. "To think that I've risked my skin all these years to come down to sitting at home within four walls and trotting about after a little brat of a girl! Don't come near me with it--I won't touch the creature!" Captain Rauchfuss was angry and out of humor. To be a country gentleman and husband of the pretty widow was well enough; but father of a family--that didn't suit him at all; it was not in his line. And oftener than before he had his trap hitched up and drove down into Weimar; or else he went shooting over his own ground, or to Sperber's to play bulldog with the old man and any one who happened in, or bézique with the pastor. He was on specially good terms with old Sperber, because he too had a strong objection to the way things were going down in the town. "That's all silly impudence down there," he would say. "Well, we'll see how far they'll go with it--we'll see. Those fellows in the town might give over scribbling; no cock would crow the louder, nor would loaves of bread get any smaller. But we ...! Suppose we up there, and people like us up and down the country were to stop working, what do you think would happen then, my friend? Simply the end of the world--all up, done! "And so I don't set foot down there, if I can help it. I don't let it irritate me any more--God forbid. I'm very well off up here, I'm bound to say--and I wouldn't change places with any of those frogs that have swelled to such unnatural proportions down there in the marsh." Indeed, the old fellows up on the Ettersberg often held discourses over their bézique which were almost blasphemous, if you consider that they were talking about the greatest man of Germany; without whom Germany would not be Germany; the man to produce whom nature labored for thousands of years, tossed up millions and millions of stupid or average heads, more or less lacking in sense and reason. That down there in Weimar at last the barren tree of humanity had borne a fruit seemed to the card-players of the Ettersberg a matter of no importance; but the tree went on producing its green leaves quite joyously. To them this fruit, indeed, seemed to be not a fruit at all but a blister, a perfectly unnecessary excrescence. And they had nothing to complain of, heaven knew, up on their Ettersberg; their fine properties were prospering.