I scarce know rightly how it happened; but here, while I am anxiously studying the foolish twisted visage of the shaver, and he just then chanced to lay his long-whetted weapon a little too abruptly against my bare throat, I gave him such a sudden bounce on the abdominal viscera, that the silly varlet had well-nigh suicidally slit his own windpipe. For me, truly, nothing remained but to indemnify the man; and then, contrary to my usual principles, to tie round a broad stuffed cravat, by way of cloak to what remained unshorn. [Note 80: In the summer of life, men keep digging and filling ice-pits as well as circumstances will admit; that so, in their Winter, they may have something in store to give them coolness.] [Note 28: It is impossible for me, amid the tendril-forest of allusions (even this again is a tendril-twig), to state and declare on the spot whether all the Courts or Heights, the (Bougouer) _Snowline_ of Europe, have ever been mentioned in my Writings or not; but I could wish for information on the subject, that if not, I may try to do it still.] And now at last I sallied forth to the General, drinking out the remnant of the Pontac, as I crossed the threshold. I hope, there were plans lying ready within me for answering rightly, nay for asking. The Petition I carried in my pocket, and in my right hand. In the left I had a duplicate of it. My fire of spirit easily helped over the living fence of ministerial obstructions; and soon I unexpectedly found myself in the ante-chamber, among his most distinguished lackeys; persons, so far as I could see, not inclined to change flour for bran with any one. Selecting the most respectable individual of the number, I delivered him my paper request, accompanied with the verbal one that he would hand it in. He took it, but ungraciously: I waited in vain till far in the sixth hour, at which season alone the gay General can safely be applied to. At last I pitch upon another lackey, and repeat my request: he runs about seeking his runaway brother, or my Petition; to no purpose, neither of them could be found. How happy was it that in the midst of my Pontac, before shaving, I had written out the duplicate of this paper; and therefore--simply on the principle that you should always keep a second wooden leg packed into your knapsack when you have the first on your body--and out of fear that if the original petition chanced to drop from me in the way between the Tiger and Schabacker's, my whole journey and hope would melt into water--and therefore, I say, having stuck the repeating work of that original paper into my pocket, I had, in any case, something to hand in, and that something truly a Ditto. I handed it in.