Meantime Glantz, the ecclesiastical councillor, proceeded in his pathetic harangue--'Oh, Kabel, my Kabel!' he ejaculated, and almost wept with joy at the near approach of his tears, 'the time shall come that by the side of thy loving breast, covered with earth, mine also shall lie mouldering and in cor----' _ruption_ he would have said; but Flacks, starting up in trouble, and with eyes overflowing, threw a hasty glance around him, and said, 'With submission, gentlemen, to the best of my belief I am weeping.' Then sitting down, with great satisfaction he allowed the tears to stream down his face; that done, he soon recovered his cheerfulness and his _aridity_. Glantz the councillor thus saw the prize fished away before his eyes--those very eyes which he had already brought into an _Accessit_,[19] or inchoate state of humidity; this vexed him: and his mortification was the greater on thinking of his own pathetic exertions, and the abortive appetite for the prize which he had thus uttered in words as ineffectual as his own sermons; and at this moment he was ready to weep for spite--and 'to weep the more because he wept in vain.' As to Flacks, a protocol was immediately drawn up of his watery compliance with the will of Van der Kabel: and the messuage in Dog-street was knocked down to him for ever. The Mayor adjudged it to the poor devil with all his heart: indeed, this was the first occasion ever known in Haslau, on which the tears of a schoolmaster and a curate had converted themselves--not into mere amber that incloses only a worthless insect, like the tears of Heliodes, but like those of the goddess Freia, into heavy gold. Glantz congratulated Flacks very warmly; and observed with a smiling air, that possibly he had himself lent him a helping hand by his pathetic address. As to the others, the separation between them and Flacks was too palpable, in the mortifying distinction of _wet_ and _dry_, to allow of any cordiality between them; and they stood aloof therefore: but they stayed to hear the rest of the will, which they now awaited in a state of anxious agitation. [19] To the English reader it may be necessary to explain, that in the continental universities, etc., when a succession of prizes is offered, graduated according to the degrees of merit, the illiptical formula of '_Accessit_' denotes the second prize; and hence, where only a single prize is offered, the second degree of merit may properly be expressed by the term here used. THE HOUSEHOLD WRECK.