From that day forward, when the artist had gone away, and taken the picture with him, old Hans was quite changed: he went about the village, talking to himself, and was often heard to mutter, "Nailed up to the wall--stolen! Hans has his eyes open day and night, looking down from the wall--never sleeps, nor eats, nor drinks. Stolen!--the thief!" Seldom could a sensible word be drawn from him; but he played the wildest tunes on his fiddle, and every now and then would stop and laugh, exclaiming, as if gazing at something, "Ha, ha! you old fellow there, nailed up to the wall, with your fiddle; you can't play--you are the wrong one--here he sits!" On one occasion the spirit of the old man burst out again: it was the day when the gayly-decked fir bush was stuck upon the finished gable of the new schoolhouse.[R] The carpenters and masons came, dressed in their Sunday clothes, preceded by a band of music, to fetch "the master." The old fiddler, Hans, was the whole day long in high spirits--brisk and gay as in his best years. He sang, drank, and played till late into the night, and in the morning he was found, with his fiddle-bow in his hand, dead in his bed.... Many of the villagers fancy, in the stillness of the night, when the clock strikes twelve, that they hear a sound in the schoolhouse, like the sweetest tones of a fiddle. Some say that it is old Hans's instrument, which he bequeathed to the schoolhouse, and which plays by itself. Others declare that the tones which Hans played _into_ the wood and stones, when the house was building, come _out_ of them again in the night. Be this as it may, the children are taught all the new rational methods of instruction, in a building which is still haunted by the ghost of the last fiddler. * * * * * GEORGE III. gave Lord Eldon a seal, containing a figure of Religion looking up to Heaven, and of Justice with no bandage over her eyes, his Majesty remarking at the same time, that Justice should be bold enough to look the world in the face. The motto of the seal was _His dirige te. Quere._ Would not this be a more appropriate inscription for the spout of a tea-pot than for the seal of a Lord Chancellor. FOOTNOTES: [R] This custom is prettily related in Auerbach's story of 'Ivo.' From Dickens' Household Words. A BIOGRAPHY OF A BAD SHILLING.