Prayer consists, not in its fulfilment, but in its accustoming you to pray; so likewise petitionary papers ought to be given in, not indeed that you may get the office,—this nothing but your money can do,—but that you may learn to write petitions. In truth, if, among the Calmucks, the turning of a calabash[1] stands in place of Prayer, a slight movement of the purse may be as much as if you supplicated in words.
Towards evening—it was Sunday—he went out roving over the village; he pilgrimed to his old sporting-places, and to the common where he had so often driven his snails to pasture; visited the peasant who, from school-times upwards, had been wont, to the amazement of the rest, to thou[2] him; went, an Academic Tutor, to the Schoolmaster; then to the Senior; then to the Episcopalbarn or church. This last no mortal understands, till I explain it. The case was this. Some three-and-forty years ago a fire had destroyed the church (not the steeple), the parsonage, and, what was not to be replaced, the church-records. (For this reason it was only the smallest portion of the Hukelum people that knew exactly how old they were; and the memory of
- ↑ Their prayer-barrel, Kürüdu, is a hollowed shell, a calabash, full of unrolled formulas of prayer; they sway it from side to side, and then it works. More philosophically viewed, since in prayer the feeling only is of consequence, it is much the same whether this express itself by motion of the mouth or of the calabash.
- ↑ In German, as in some other languages, the common mode of address is by the third person; plural, it indicates respect; singular, command; the second person is also used; plural, it generally denotes indifference; singular, great familiarity, and sometimes its product, contempt. Dutzenfreund, Thouing-friend, is the strictest term of intimacy; and among the wild Burschen (Students) many a duel (happily however, often ending like the Polemo-Middinia in one drop of blood) has been fought, in consequence of saying Du (thou) and Sie (they) in the wrong place.—Ed.
