Circumstances being such, of course no one will wonder at what I am presently to report. The dancing-, music-, and fencing-master, who boasted little of his steps, touches, and thrusts, but so much the more of his (Imperial Diet-) Literature,--for he had the new names of the months, the orthography of Klopstock, and the Latin characters in German letters sooner in _his_ letters than any one of us,--would fain show the house of Wehrfritz that he understood a little more of literature and knew a thing or two better than other Viennites (the more so since he read absolutely nothing, not even political newspapers and novels, because he preferred real, living men); he therefore never came into the house without two pockets full of romance and verse for Rabette and Albano. He was encouraged in this by his endless officiousness, and his emulous race-running with his colleague Wehmeier in education, and the interest which he took in the youth now growing so silent, whom he wished to help out of the sweet _dreams_ which the _ruby_[36] of his glittering young life inspired with the exegetic _dream-books_, the works of the poets. The revolution which had taken place in the youth, who now mowed away whole romantic glades of Everdingen, and plucked whole poetical flower-borders of Huysum, I have now neither time nor wish even so much as tolerably to portray, on account of the above-promised wondrous circumstance; suffice it, that Albano, so situated,--the heaven of the poetic art open before him, the promised land of Romance spread out before his eyes,--resembled a planet, assailed by several whizzing comets, and blazing up with them into a common conflagration.