Spirits still rose; the attornies begged the young ladies for dances under the pear tree. One of them had invited the seven Fräuleins von Baute, one after another, and had their names written down upon his dancing-card; his friends designated him the possessor of the seven evil spirits. Father Baute, meanwhile, had forced young Doctor Reising into a corner, and declared to him, with elevated champagne glass, that he now boldly challenged the latter to any discussion, as his ideas stepped more briskly than ever across the threshold of consciousness, while Reising, on the contrary, also excited by wine, protested in permitting himself the daring utterance that consciousness has no threshold, because it has not been made by any carpenter, and indeed that mode of philosophising always caused him to imagine himself transported to some mental timber yard, as, for example, when the formation of ideas was talked of. But the Professor became beside himself; with a wide sweeping movement, he dashed the champagne glass into pieces against the wall. "You say that to a disciple of Herbart; incredible!" Reising, who had long since been shocked at his own daring, hardly knew how to shield himself from the Professor's furious wrath. Euphrasia, whose entire future threatened to fall into broken potsherds, approached the opponents, wringing her hands. Doctor Kuhl's interposition was more powerful; he thrust his Herculean form between them. "Peace, sirs! '_In vino veritas_? said one Roman; but 'what is truth!' said another Roman. Here there is certainly no time to fathom it. Look, Fräulein Euphrasia appears as an angel of peace; true womanliness was even able to redeem a thinker like Faust. Let the flag of peace be waved! We will drink to an alliance between Hegel and Herbart. Neither Napoleon nor German philosophy ever recognised anything to be impossible." The Kursaal, like Westminster Abbey, possessed a Poet's Corner in which the admired poet, Schöner, was obliged to permit himself to be instructed by the school-boy, Salomon, on several important questions concerning the art of poesy. Salomon had strengthened the consciousness of his intellectual superiority with several glasses of champagne, and could not resist pointing out to Poet Schöner, despite all recognition of his talents, that political lyrics were an unlawful hermaphrodite species of poetry, inasmuch as one is always led away to subjects about which leading articles appear in the newspapers. What a totally different influence a song of Heine or Eichendorff possesses: "_In einem kühlen Grunde, da geht ein Mühlenrad_." "The mill wheel in the cool valley, my friend," said Schöner, as he patted the young connoisseur upon his shoulders with the air of a protector, "goes round in our heads too long already, and the German people become so stupid with all that folly, so stupid--let us drink to your well-being, young poet!"