After breakfast, to fortify himself with new vigour for his desk, he for some time strolled idly over the house, and, like a Police Fire-inspector, visited all the nooks of his cottage, to gather from them here and there a live ember from the ash-covered rejoicing-fire of his childhood. He mounted to the garret, to the empty bird-coops of his father, who in winter had been a birder; and he transiently reviewed the lumber of his old playthings, which were lying in the netted enclosure of a large canary breeding-cage. In the minds of children, it is regular _little_ forms, such as those of balls and dies, that impress and express themselves most forcibly. From this may the reader explain to himself Fixlein's delight in the red acorn-blockhouse, in the sparwork glued together out of white chips and husks of potato-plums, in the cheerful glass-house of a cube-shaped lantern, and other the like products of his early architecture. The following, however, I explain quite differently: he had ventured, without leave given from any lord of the manor, to build a clay house; not for cottagers, but for flies; and which, therefore, you could readily enough have put in your pocket. This fly-hospital had its glass windows, and a red coat of colouring, and very many alcoves, and three balconies: balconies, as a sort of house within a house, he had loved from of old so much, that he could scarcely have liked Jerusalem well, where (according to Lightfoot) no such thing is permitted to be built. From the glistening eyes, with which the architect had viewed his tenantry creeping about the windows or feeding out of the sugar-trough,--for, like the Count St. Germain, they ate nothing but sugar,--from this joy an adept in the art of education might easily have prophesied his turn for household contraction; to his fancy, in those times, even gardeners'-huts were like large waste Arks and Halls, and nothing bigger than such a fly-Louvre seemed a true, snug, citizen's-house. He now felt and handled his old high child's-stool, which had, in former days, resembled the _Sedes Exploratoria_ of the Pope; he gave his child's-coach a tug and made it run; but he could not understand what balsam and holiness so much distinguished it from all other child's-coaches. He wondered that the real sports of children should not so delight him, as the emblems of these sports, when the child that had carried them on was standing grown up to manhood in his presence. Before one article in the house he stood heart-melted and sad; before a little angular clothes-press, which was no higher than my table, and which had belonged to his poor drowned brother. When the boy with the key of it was swallowed by the waves, the excruciated mother had made a vow that this toy-press of his should never be broken up by violence. Most probably there is nothing in it, but the poor soul's playthings. Let us look away from this bloody urn.----