The grand movement began. On a boundary bridge, which, like the printer's hyphen, was at once sign of separation and of connection between the two principalities, half Hohenfliess already sat halting in carriages and on horseback, until an upset, shabby old vehicle, with village comedians, could be raised again on the fourth wheel, and the mythological household furniture which they had in hand packed in. But when the Princess made her way by main force on to the bridge, suddenly passengers and packers converted themselves into muses, gods of music, gods of love, and a pretty little Hymen, and, in theatrical decoration and apparatus, flooded the encircled bride with their poetic effusions, representing the war of the other gods against the virgin-stealer Hymen. The son of the muses who had versified the matter acted a part himself, as father of the muses. I dare say that this original invention of the Minister was very favorably received, as well by Haarhaar as by Hohenfliess. Froulay, all prinked and powdered, as if he were stretching himself out on the bed of state between funeral-gueridons,[5] marched out before her as spokesman of the country, which wished to testify its happy participation in her marriage to the Bridegroom's-coat. The Princess abridged and clipped short all festal lying with a fine pair of ladies' scissors. Froulay had, among other carriages, brought with him also one containing several trumpeters and kettle-drummers, levied from all quarters, in which, for joke's sake, Schoppe stood, too, who did not often stay away from great processions of men, for this reason, because men never looked more ridiculous than when they did anything in mass and multitude. By way of bringing salt to the solemnities, he set up in his carriage the hypothesis that they were doing all this merely, with the best intention, for the sake of driving the bride back again to where she had come from, partly by way of sparing her the sham- and stage-marriage, partly by way of sparing the land the new court-state. Her ear, he assumed, when the cannon drawn up on the surrounding hills mingled with the trumpeting of his thunder-car, and three postmasters, with fifteen postilions, who had not been posted there _for nothing_, with their best horns and lungs, blew their horns at the same moment,--her ear must be very much tortured, and she somewhat repelled, by such a welcome. Hence they even send empty state-coaches with the rest, just for the sake of the rattling, even as, in the province of Anspach, the farmer, merely by frightful screaming, without ammunition or dogs, drives the stags from his crops.[6] As ships do in the fog by lanterns and drums, so would states fain keep themselves apart by illumination and firing.