For all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus, you regard your existence as a drum: this has only one single _tone_, but variety of _time_ gives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at his desk by night; and so lived on in the usual monotonous fashion--all the time from the Holidays--till Christmas-eve, 1791; and nothing was remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to paint. But I shall still have time to paint it, after, in the first place, explaining shortly how, like birds of passage, he had contrived to soar away over the dim cloudy Harvest. The secret was, he set upon the _Hamburg Political Journal_, with which the lackeys of Schadeck had been for papering their buttons. He could now calmly, with his back at the stove, accompany the winter campaigns of the foregoing year; and fly after every battle, as the ravens did after that of Pharsalia. On the printed paper he could still, with joy and admiration, walk round our German triumphal arches and scaffoldings for fireworks: while to the people in the town, who got only the newest newspapers, the very fragments of these our trophies, maliciously torn down by the French, were scarcely discernible; nay, with old plans he could drive back and discomfit the enemy, while later readers in vain tried to resist them with new ones. Moreover, not only did the facility of conquering the French prepossess him in favour of this journal; but also the circumstance that it--cost him nothing. His attachment to gratis reading was decided. And does not this throw light on the fact, that he, as Morhof advised, was wont sedulously to collect the separate leaves of waste-paper books as they came from the grocer, and to rake among the same, as Virgil did in Ennius? Nay, for him the grocer was a Fortius (the scholar), or a Frederick (the king), both which persons were in the habit of simply cutting from complete books such leaves as contained anything. It was also this respect for all waste-paper that inspired him with such esteem for the aprons of French cooks, which it is well known consist of printed paper; and he often wished some German would translate these aprons: indeed I am willing to believe that a good version of more than one of such paper aprons might contribute to elevate our Literature (this Muse _a belles fesses_), and serve her in place of drivel-bib.--On many things a man puts a _pretium affectionis_, simply because he hopes he may have half stolen them: on this principle, combined with the former, our Quintus adopted into his belief anything he could snap away from an open Lecture, or as a visitor in class-rooms; opinions only for which the Professor must be paid, he rigorously examined.--I return to the Christmas-eve.