Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/122

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LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN.

deners'-huts were like large waste Arks and Halls, and nothing bigger than such a fly-Louvre seemed a true, snun; 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.— —

Bacon reckons the remembrances of childhood among wholesome, medicinal things; naturally enough, therefore, they acted like a salutary digestive on the Quintus. He could now again betake him with new heart to his desk, and produce something quite peculiar,—petitions for church livings. He took the Address-calendar, and, for every country parish that he found in it, got a petition in readiness; which he then laid aside, till such time as the present incumbent should decease. For Hukelum alone he did not solicit.—It is a pretty custom in Flachsenfingen, that, for every office which is vacant, you are required, if you want it, to sue. As the higher use of