so smiling—so courteous—so vain of the disloaded freight, and so attentive to it. He looked as if in the journey of life he had never once put on the travelling-gauze of Sorrow; Thiennette again seemed never to have thrown hers back. How neat was everything in the house, how dainty, decorated, and polished! And yet so quiet, without the cursed alarm-ringing of servants' bells, and without the bass-drum tumult of stair-pedalling. Whilst the gentlemen, my road-companions, were sitting in state in the upper room, I flitted, as my way is, like a smell over the whole house, and my path led me through the sitting-room over the kitchen, and at last into the churchyard beside the house. Good Saturday! I will paint thy hours as I may, with the black asphaltos of ink, on the tablets of other souls! In the sitting-room, I lifted from the desk a volume gilt on the back and edges, and bearing this title: "Holy Sayings, by Fixlein. First Collection." And as I looked to see where it had been printed, the Holy Collection turned out to be in writing. I handled the quills, and dipped into the negro-black of the ink, and I found that all was right and good. With your fluttering gentlemen of letters, who hold only a department of the foreign, and none of the home affairs nothing (except some other things about them) can be worse than their ink and pens. I also found a little copperplate, to which I shall in due time return.
In the kitchen, a place not more essential for the writing of an English novel than for the acting of a German one, I could plant myself beside Thiennette, and help her to blow the fire, and look at once into her face and her burning coals. Though she was in wedlock, a state in which white roses on the cheeks are changed for red ones, and young women are similar to a similitude given
