As it is but a few clear Ladydays, warm Mayday-nights, at the most a few odorous Rose-weeks, which I am digging from this Fixleinic Life, embedded in the dross of week-day cares; and as if they were so many veins of silver, am separating, stamping, smelting and burnishing for the reader,--I must now travel on with the stream of his history to Cantata-Sunday, 1792, before I can gather a few handfuls of this gold-dust, to carry in and wash in my biographical gold-hut. That Sunday, on the contrary, is very metalliferous: do but consider that Fixlein is yet uncertain (the ashes of the Church-books not being legible) whether it is conducting him into his thirty-second or his thirty-third year. From Christmas till then he did nothing, but simply became Conrector. The new chair of office was a Sun-altar, on which, from his Quintus-ashes, a young Phoenix combined itself together. Great changes--in offices, marriages, travels--make us younger; we always date our history from the last revolution, as the French have done from theirs. A colonel, who first set foot on the ladder of seniority as corporal, is five times younger than a king, who in his whole life has never been aught else except a--crown-prince. FIFTH LETTER-BOX. _Cantata-Sunday. Two Testaments. Pontac; Blood; Love._ The Spring months clothe the earth in new variegated hues; but man they usually dress in black. Just when our icy regions are becoming fruitful, and the flower-waves of the meadows are rolling together over our quarter of the globe, we on all hands meet with men in sables, the beginning of whose Spring is full of tears. But, on the other hand, this very upblooming of the renovated earth is itself the best balm for sorrow over those who lie under it; and graves are better hid by blossoms than by snow. In April, which is no less deadly than it is fickle, old Senior Astmann, our Conrector's teacher, was overtaken by death. His departure it was meant to hide from the Rittmeisterinn; but the unusual ringing of funereal peals carried his swan-song to her heart; and gradually set the curfew-bell of her life into similar movement. Age and sufferings had already marked out the first incisions for Death, so that he required but little effort to cut her down; for it is with men as with trees, they are notched long before felling, that their life-sap may exude. The second stroke of apoplexy was soon followed by the last: it is strange that Death, like criminal courts, cites the apoplectic thrice.