Perhaps it is a petition for some particularly fine sort of turnip-seed which only the Herr Vater has got; or else he is requested to look into his wise book to see if he can find a remedy for the stubborn cough of a favorite horse, or the distressing state of the calf’s digestion. Another will bring him a dish of golden honey-comb, with some question regarding the smoking of the hives; while a fourth has come to request the pastor to transform his new-born son from a pagan into a Christian infant. Various deputations of villagers, inviting the pastor to two different funerals and to six weddings, have successively been disposed of: then will come a peasant with some Hungarian legal document which he would like to have deciphered. Has he won the lawsuit which has been pending these two years and more? or has he lost it, and will he be obliged to pay the damages as well? This is a riddle which only the Herr Vater can read him aright by consulting the big Hungarian dictionary on the shelf. The next visitor is perchance an old white-bearded man, bent double with the weight of years, and carrying a well-worn Bible under his arm. He wants to know his age, which used to be entered somewhere here in the book; but he cannot find the place, or else the bookbinder, in mending the volume last year, has pasted paper over it. Perhaps the Herr Vater can make it out for him; and further to facilitate the search, he mentions that there was corn in the upper fields, and maize in the low meadows, the year he was born, and that since then the corn has been sown twenty-four times on the same spot, and will be sown there again next year if God pleases to spare him. The pastor, who must of course be well versed in this sort of rural arithmetic, has no difficulty in pronouncing the man to be exactly seventy-three years and three months old, and sends him away well pleased to discover that he is a whole year younger than he had believed himself to be. Often, too, a couple appear on the scene for the purpose of being reconciled. The man has beaten his wife, and she has come to complain—not of the beating in the abstract, but of the manner in which this particular castigation has been administered. It was really too bad this time, as, sobbing, she explains to the Herr Vater that he has belabored her with a thick leather thong in a truly heathenish fashion, instead of taking the broomstick, as does every respectable man, to beat his wife.