When I awoke, the sun shone as usual through the window; there was a sound of drums in the street; and as I entered our sitting-room and wished my father, who sat in his white dressing-gown, good morning, I heard the little light-footed barber, as he made up his hair, narrate very minutely that homage would that morning be offered at the Town Hall to the Archduke Joachim. I heard too that the new ruler was of excellent family, that he had married the sister of the Emperor Napoleon, and was really a very respectable man; that he wore his beautiful black hair in curls; that he would shortly enter the town, and would certainly please all the ladies. Meanwhile the drumming in the streets continued, and I stood before the house-door and looked at the French troops marching--those joyous and famous people who swept over the world--singing and playing, the merry, serious faces of the Grenadiers, the bear-skin shakoes, the tri-coloured cockades, the glittering bayonets, the _voltigeurs_ full of vivacity and _point d’honneur_, and the giant-like, silver-laced tambour major, who cast his _baton_ with the gilded head as high as the first storey, and his eyes to the second, where pretty girls gazed from the windows. I was so glad that soldiers were to be quartered in our house--my mother was not glad--and I hastened to the Market Place. There everything looked changed; it was as though the world had been new whitewashed. A new coat-of-arms was placed on the Town Hall; its iron balconies were hung with embroidered velvet drapery, French Grenadiers stood as sentinels, the old town councillors had put on new faces and Sunday coats, and looked at each other French fashion, and said, “_Bon jour!_” Ladies peeped from every window, inquisitive citizens and soldiers filled the square, and I, with other boys, climbed on the shining Prince-Elector’s great bronze horse, and looked down on the motley crowd. Neighbour Peter and Long Conrad nearly broke their necks on this occasion, and that would have been well, for the one afterwards ran away from his parents, enlisted as a soldier, deserted, and was finally shot in Mayence; while the other, having made geographical researches in strange pockets, became a working member of a public tread-mill institute. But having broken the iron bands which bound him to his fatherland, he passed safely beyond sea, and eventually died in London, in consequence of wearing a much too long cravat, one end of which happened to be firmly attached to something just as a royal official removed a plank from beneath his feet.