Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/108

100 Orphan Hospital were uplifting with clear voices their morning hymn. The city was Flachsenfingen, the village Hukelum, the dog Schil, and the year of Grace 1791.

11 Manikin," said he to the Quintaner, for he liked to speak as Love, children, and the people of Vienna do, in diminutives, " Manikin, give me the bundle to the village : run about, and seek thee a little bird, as thou art thyself, and so have some- thing to pet too in vacation-time." For the manikin was at once his page, lackey, room-comrade, train-bearer and gentle- man-in-waiting ; and the Shock also was his manikin.

He slept slowly along, through the crisped cole-beds, over- laid with coloured beads of dew ; and looked at the bushes, out of which, when the morning wind bent them asunder, there seemed to start a flight of jewel-colibri, so brightly did they glitter. From time to time he drew the bell-rope of his whistle, that the manikin might not skip away too far ; and he shortened his league and half of road, by measuring it not in leagues, but in villages. It is more pleasant for pedestrians for geographers it is not to count by wersts than by miles. In walking, our Quintus farthermore got by heart the few fields, on which the grain was already reaped.

But now roam slower, Fixlein, through his Lordship's garden of Hukelum ; not, indeed, lest thy coat sweep away any tulip-stamina, but that thy good mother may have time to lay her Cupid's-band of black taffeta about her smooth brow. I am grieved to think my fair readers take it ill of her, that she means first to iron this same band : they cannot know that she has no maid ; and that today the whole Preceptorial dinner the money purveyances the guest has made over to her three days before is to be arranged and prepared by herself, without the aid of any Mistress of the Household whatever ; for indeed she belongs to the Tiers Etat, being neither more nor less than a gardener's widow.

You can figure how this true, warm-hearted mother may have lain in wait all morning for her Schoolman, whom she loved as the apple of her eye ; since, on the whole populous Earth, she had not (her first son, as well as her husband, was dead) any other for her soul, which indeed overflowed with love ; not any other but her Zebedaus. Could she ever tell