"Master Unwirrsch, you are a fool! Have your picture painted on the wall!... Is it one? Did ever anybody hear the like from such a sensible old man and the head of a house?... Is it one? Master Unwirrsch, next, I believe, you'll forget how to tell a boot from a shoe. This just shows what a cross it is when God's gift comes so late. Isn't that a boy that you've got there in your arms? Isn't that really a boy, a fine, proper boy? Lord, if the old creature didn't have the poor little thing in his arms I'd like to give him a good box on the ears for putting such a silly, meddlesome question! Not a boy? Indeed it is a boy, Father Pitch-thread--not one of the heaviest, to be sure; but still a boy, and a proper boy at that! And how shouldn't it be a boy? Isn't Bonnyparty, isn't Napoleum on his way again across the water and won't there be war and tussling between today and tomorrow, and don't we need boys, and isn't it exactly for that reason that in these strange times of ours more boys than girls come into the world, and aren't there three boys to one girl? and you come to me, to an experienced and sensible person like me, and ask such outrageous questions? Have your picture painted on the wall, Father Unwirrsch, and have written underneath it what I think of you. Here, give the boy to me, you don't deserve to have him bother with you--go along with you to your wife--perhaps you'll ask her too, if it's--a--boy!" Ungently the infant was snatched from the arms of the despised, crushed father and, after getting his breath, Master Anton Unwirrsch hobbled into the bedroom of his wife, and the evening bells still rang. But we will not disturb either the father and mother or the bells--let them give full utterance to their feelings with no one to interfere. Poor people and rich people have different ways of life in this world; but when the sun of happiness shines into their huts, houses, or palaces, it gilds with the very same gold the wooden bench and the velvet chair, the whitewashed wall and the gilt one, and more than one sly dog of a philosopher says he has noticed that as far as joy and sorrow are concerned the difference between rich and poor people is not nearly as great as both classes often, very often, extremely often think. Be that as it may; it is enough for us that laughter is not a monopoly nor weeping an obligation on this spherical, fire-filled ball with its flattened poles, onto which we find our way without desiring it, and from which, without desiring it, we depart, after the interval between our coming and going has been made bitter enough for us. The sun now shone into the house of poor people. Happiness, smiling, stooped to enter the low doorway, both her open hands extended in greeting. There was great joy over the birth of the son on the part of the parents, the shoemaker Unwirrsch and his wife, who had waited for him so long that they were almost on the point of giving up hope altogether.