There they are: his poor poet, a little, lean old man, with a sharp nose and a night-cap, sits at his garret window scanning verses on his frozen fingers, enveloped in a blanket drawn up to his chin, and protected from the inclemency of the weather by a great red umbrella; his clerk, grown grey in the dust of parchments, sharpens his quill with dim-sighted eyes, and feels himself part of a bureaucracy which rules the world; his book-worm stands on the highest ladder in the library, with books in his hand, books in his pockets, books under his arms, and books jammed between his legs, and neglects the dinner-hour in his peaceful enjoyment, until an angry torrent of scolding is poured over his devoted head by the housekeeper; there is his old gentleman devoutly sniffing the perfume of a cactus blossom which has been looked forward to for years; there is his little man enticing his bird with a lump of sugar; the widower glancing aside from the miniature of his better half at a pair of pretty maidens walking in the park; the constable whiling away the time at the town-gate in catching flies; the old-fashioned bachelor, solemnly presenting a bouquet to a kitchen-maid who is busied at the market-well, to the amusement of all the gossips watching him from the windows; the lovers who in happy oblivion pass down a narrow street by the stall of a second-hand dealer, where amidst antiquated household goods a gilded statuette of Venus reposes in a rickety cradle; the children holding up their pinafores as they beg the stork flying by to bring them a little brother. Spitzweg, like Jean Paul, makes an effect which is at once joyous and tender, _bourgeois_ and idyllic. The postillion gives the signal on his horn that the moment for starting has arrived; milk-maids look down from the green mountain summit into the far country; hermits sit before their cells forgotten by the world; old friends greet each other after years of separation; Dachau girls in their holiday best pray in woodland chapels; school children pass singing through a still mountain valley; maidens chatter of an evening as they fetch water from the moss-grown well, or the arrival of the postman in his yellow uniform brings to their windows the entire population of an old country town.