"O Heavens! if I should succeed (but why not, since my tongue remains of iron and this leaf comes, in iron, under charge of the honest Wehrfritz, whose heart is an old German, and does not _Germany_ rightly represent the _heart_ in the virgin Europa?)--if, I write, I should succeed in kindling a fire upon a cursed mystery of a straw-door, tearing all up and down and away, blind gates and sacrificial gates, and a strong light should fall in upon the brave Linda and the brave youth, illuminating the neighboring Baldhead (perhaps somebody else), who even in the darkness will fain make a slanting thrust with two grafting and slaughtering knives down into a brother and sister---- "If I should once succeed in this, that is to say, in the harvest month,--for then I should come back again to Pestitz and have the likeness in my pocket,--and I should have boldly avenged myself and two innocent beings upon guilty ones: then would I hold myself fully at liberty to seize hold of my head and say, '_À bas, gare_, heads off!' To which, certainly, (since, indeed, the question is not of any stupid packing off of the body by a Werther-powder, but only of the purpose to lose, upon occasion, what competent judges call my understanding,) my friends must agree, because they would still have me (since in this case the body is still retained), although as the night-piece of a man, because I would then carry on a rational discourse upon any subject (only let no one attack the fixed idea!) as well as another man, and certainly should not forget to sprinkle over it, now and then, a good moral joke (verily the true spice), and because the state should find me day and night equipped and saddled to save it, after the example of the Berlin Bedlamites, who once, upon a fire breaking out in the house, extinguished it and saved the house in the best style, and I would come in at the gap and the breach, when the dark intervals of its other civil servants could not otherwise be filled up than with our lucid ones. "Farewell! I break off. The world smiles upon me gayly. In Spain I shall find a bit of youth again--as in this writing. "Schoppe. "Apropos! Has the Baldhead nowhere run against thee? I cannot tell thee how I labor now daily to impress upon myself and appropriate beforehand a real horror and dread at the wish of running him down hereafter in my madness, in order that afterward the possible act may not, as a late fruit of my previous rational, moral state, be reckoned over against me into the other. "_Annihilate this letter!_"