"Oh Lord!" cried the Clerk of the Privy Chancery, almost out of his mind, "my face green for ever and ever! What will people say? What will His Excellency, the minister, say? His Excellency will think I have had my face painted green from motives of mere worldly vanity! Ah! it's all over with me. I shall be suspended from my official functions. The Government will never hear of such a thing as a Clerk of the Privy Chancery with a green face. Wretched man that I am; what's to become of me?" "Come, come, Tussmann!" the Goldsmith said; "don't make such a fuss. I have no doubt there's hope for you yet, if you pull yourself together, and get rid of this idiotic notion of marrying Miss Bosswinkel." In answer to this, Tussmann and Bosswinkel cried out together, in what is termed on the lyric stage "_ensemble_"-- "I can't." "He shan't." The Goldsmith fixed his sparkling, penetrating eyes on the two of them; but just as he was going to burst out at them, the door opened, and in came Manasseh, with his nephew, Baron Benjamin Dümmerl, from Vienna. "Benjie" went straight up to Albertine--who had never seen him in her life before--and said, in a disagreeable, drawling tone, as he took her hand-- "I have come here in person, dear Miss Bosswinkel, to lay myself at your feet. Of course you know that is a mere _façon de parler_. Baron Dümmerl doesn't really lay himself at anybody's feet, not even at the Emperor's. What I mean is--let me have a kiss." So saying, he went nearer to Albertine, and bent down towards her. But, at that moment, a something happened which neither he nor anybody else--except the Goldsmith--anticipated, and which caused them all much alarm. Benjie's rather sizeable nose suddenly shot forward to such a length that, passing beyond Albertine's face, it struck the opposite wall of the room with a tremendous, resounding bang. He started back a step or two, and his nose at once drew in to its ordinary dimensions. He approached Albertine again, with exactly the same result. To make a long tale short, his nose kept on shooting in and out like a trombone. "Cursed necromancer!" Manasseh roared; and took a thin cord, fastened in a sort of knot, out of his pocket, which he threw to the Commissionsrath, crying--"Throw that about the brute's neck--the Goldsmith, I mean--and then drag him out of the room. Never mind about ceremony. Do as I tell you. All will be right then." The Commissionsrath took hold of the noose, but instead of throwing it about the Goldsmith's neck, he threw it over the Jew's; and immediately he and the Jew began flying up to the ceiling and then down again. And so they went on, shooting up and down, while Benjie carried on his nose-concerto, and Tussmann laughed like a mad creature, till the Commissionsrath fell down nearly fainting in an arm-chair.