Is drumming, now, an inborn talent, or was it early developed in me? Enough--it lies in my limbs, in my hands, in my feet, and often manifests itself involuntarily. I once sat at Berlin in the lecture-room of the Privy Councillor Schmaltz, a man who had saved the State by his book on the _Red and Black Coat Danger_. You remember, perhaps, Madam, out of Pausanias, that by the braying of an ass an equally dangerous plot was once discovered; and you also know from Livy, or from Becker’s _History of the World_, that geese once saved the capital; and you must certainly know from Sallust that a loquacious _putain_, the Lady Livia, brought the terrible conspiracy of Cataline to light. But to return to the mutton aforesaid. I listened to international law in the lecture-room of the Herr Privy Councillor Schmaltz, and it was a sleepy summer afternoon, and I sat on the bench and heard less and less--my head had gone to sleep, when all at once I was wakened by the noise of my own feet, which had stayed awake, and had probably observed that the exact opposite of international law and constitutional tendencies was being preached; and my feet, which, with the little eyes of their corns, had seen more of how things go in the world than the Privy Councillor with his Juno eyes--these poor dumb feet, incapable of expressing their immeasurable meaning by words, strove to make themselves intelligible by drumming, and they drummed so loudly that I thereby nearly came to grief. Cursed, unreflecting feet! They once played me a similar trick, when I on a time, in Göttingen, sponged without subscribing on the lectures of Professor Saalfeld; and as, with an angular activity, he jumped about here and there in his pulpit, and heated himself in order to curse the Emperor Napoleon in regular set style,--no, my poor feet, I cannot blame you for drumming then; indeed, I would not have blamed you if in your dumb _naïveté_ you had expressed yourselves by still more energetic movements. How could I, the scholar of Le Grand, hear the Emperor cursed? The Emperor, the Emperor, the great Emperor! The Emperor is dead. On a waste island in the Atlantic Ocean is his grave; and he for whom the world was too narrow lies quietly under a little hillock, where five weeping willows hang their green heads, and a little brook, murmuring sorrowfully, ripples by. There is no inscription on his tomb; but Clio, with a just pen, has written thereon invisible words, which will resound, like spirit tones, through thousands of years. Britannia! the sea is thine. But the sea has not water enough to wash away the shame with which the death of that mighty one has covered thee. Not thy windy Sir Hudson--no, thou thyself wert the Sicilian bravo with whom perjured kings bargained that they might revenge on the man of the people what he had once inflicted on one of themselves. And he was thy guest, and had seated himself by thy hearth.