"Quite martial!" cried the Baron. "And yet I shall prove to be right, and perhaps you yourself, sooner or later, when you are forced, like a squirrel, to make the same orthodox springs over and over again at the end of your chain, in order to crack the nuts which your wife allows you, will sigh, 'Ah! had I but believed my resolute friend Willen!'" "No, sir," said the counsellor with warmth, "your view of the subject proceeds from nothing but despair: nay, you do not even believe yourself." "For aught I care," cried the other, "it may be that a creature totally different from myself is speaking out of me; for that is often the case in life, and, even among those apostolical folks themselves, there often peeps a something like an ape, out of their fringed and stiffened drapery. Is it not so? Especially out of that elderly maiden, the too unworldly Miss Erhard, that incomparable mistress of the art of education? She has set the pattern of a close cap of inward sentiment for the whole family, while for herself she has fitted a headdress of religion after the most flourishing fashion. You think when she crows out her oracle, and twists her little eyes, we unbelievers must immediately truckle under. It is with her I am most out of patience, for she it is in fact that has radically ruined the whole family." They were now standing at the spring. The sun had long set, and a man was seen winding out of the darkness from behind the willow bush. "Ah! Michael!" cried the Baron. "May you have occasion, gentlemen, for an honest servant?" "Why," asked the officer, "have you quitted the service of the excellent Baroness, who takes such maternal care of her people?" "Ah! your honour," said the servant, "because the other day I told a little bit of a harmless fib, I was directly turned off." "That is as it should be!" cried the officer, "there I recognize that noble-minded woman." "All was but a plot," proceeded Michael, "of that spiteful Miss Erhard: she cannot bear that man and maid should be kind to each other, because nobody will release her from her single life, and ever since she saw me give the housemaid a kiss, a month ago it was, she has borne me a grudge for it." "How vulgar!" exclaimed Alfred. "Yes, your honour," said the man, "she is not a fine lady, but she is pretty, and a kiss is a kiss after all. Now one day, that was on the maid's account too, I had forgotten to fetch a new book from town, it was one of the double-refined pious sort, I believe, and, in my quandary, I said the book was already lent, and it came out that I had not gone at all, and so, for that bit of a lie, I was immediately dismissed the service." "Have you occasion for him?" the Baron asked the two young people. They however protested, they would never have to do with a man, who could not even be endured in the most liberal and indulgent of families. "Well then, stay in the mean time with me," concluded the Baron, "but lie as little as possible."