Our hero had passed over from those childish years in which Hercules strangled the serpents, into the years of confirmation, when he warmed them under his waistcoat, to behead them again in later years. Exultingly did his new and old Adam--they flew side by side--flap their wings out there under a blue heaven which had absolutely no anchoring ground. What cared he for meal-time? All children before and during a journey carry no stomach under their wings, just as that of the butterfly shrinks up when his wings are spread. The oft-mentioned herdsman's hut, or little shooting-house, was nothing less than a shooting-house with a sentry-box, for a pensioned soldier's wife, with a shooting-stand in the lower story and a summer-house chamber in the upper, wherein old Wehrfritz every summer meant to have a rural party and a bird shooting, but never had it, because the poor man dismasted and unrigged himself in his work-chamber as others do in their dining-room. For, although the state entices its servants like dogs for the tenth time, only to cudgel them off again for the eleventh, and although Wehrfritz every assize day forswore all state business and earnings,--because an honest man like him finds always in the body politic as much to restore as in the antique statues of which only the stone _drapery_ remains,--nevertheless, he knew no softer couch and feather-bed to rest on, than a still higher bench of oars, and he was just now making every exertion to be Provincial Director. The German courts will have their own thoughts on the subject when I offer them the following boyish idyl. My black-eyed shepherd stormed the herdsman's mountain fortification, and received from the soldier's wife the door-key to the white and green summer cabinet. By Heavens! when all eastern and western window-shutters and windows were flung open, and the wind stole fluttering through the papers and cooling through the sweltry chamber, and when, outside, heaven and earth stood round about the windows and looked in beckoning,--when Albano beheld, under the window toward the east, the deep broad valley with the leaping, stony brook, on which all the glimmering disks of light which, like pebbles, the sun shot aslant, glanced up the mountain side,--when at the western window he saw, behind hills and woods, the arc of the sky, the mountain of the Linden-city, that slept like a coiled-up giant on the earth,--when he placed himself at one window after another, and said, "How magnificent!" then his raptures in the chamber grew at last so exalted, that he must needs go forth, in order, out of doors, to exalt them still higher.