"Good God, sir!" the goldsmith cried, with a face as red as a furnace, and eyes glaring with anger; "you must be out of your reason altogether. _You_, an old, worn-out pedant, to think of marrying that beautiful young creature! _You_, who, with all your erudition, and your 'diplomatic acumen,' taken from the idiotic treatise of that old goose Thomasius, can't see a quarter of an inch before that nose of yours! I advise you to drive every idea of the kind out of your head as quickly as you can, or you will probably find that you stand a good chance of having that weazened neck of yours drawn, on this autumn equinoctial night!" The Clerk of the Privy Chancery was a quiet, peaceable, nay, timorous man, incapable of saying a hard word to anybody, even when attacked; but what the goldsmith had said was just a trifle too infernally insulting; and then, Tussmann had taken more strong wine than he was accustomed to. Accordingly, there was no wonder that he did what he had never done before in his life---that is, he burst into a fury, and yelled out, right into the goldsmith's teeth: "Eh! What the devil business have you with me, Mr. Goldsmith (whose acquaintance I haven't the honour of); and how dare you talk to me in this sort of way? You seem to me to be trying to make an ass of me, by all sorts of childish delusions. I presume you have the effrontery to be paying your addresses to Miss Bosswinkel yourself; you've got hold of a portrait of her on glass, and shown it at the Town-hall in a magic-lantern held under your cloak. My good sir, _I_ know something about these matters, as well as _you_ do; you're going the wrong way to work if you think you're going to frighten and bully _me_ in this sort of way." "Be careful what you're about," the goldsmith said, very quietly, and with a strange smile. "Be very careful what you're about; you've got strange sort of people to do with here." And as he so spake, lo! instead of the goldsmith's face, there was a horrid-looking fox's face snarling and showing its teeth at Tussmann from under the goldsmith's bonnet. The Clerk of the Privy Chancery fell back in his chair in the profoundest terror. The old Jew did not seem to be in the least degree surprised by this transformation; rather, he had suddenly lost his mood of ill-temper altogether. He laughed, and cried, "Aha! capital sport! But there's nothing to be _made_ by those arts. I know better ones. I can do things which were always beyond _you_, Leonhard." "Let us see," said the goldsmith, who had assumed his human countenance again--"let us see what you can do."