Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/57

 hand! No sooner have we, with great effort, got thunder-rods manufactured, and comet-tails explained away, than the enemy opens new batteries in the Moon, or somewhere else in the Blue!

Suffice one other story to manifest how ludicrous the most serious foresight, with all imaginable inward courage, often externally appears in the eyes of the many. Equestrians are well acquainted with the dangers of a horse that runs away. My evil star would have it, that I should once in Vienna get upon a hack-horse; a pretty enough honey-coloured nag, but old and hard-mouthed as Satan; so that the beast, in the next street, went off with me; and this in truth—only at a walk. No pulling, no tugging, took effect; I, at last, on the back of this Self-riding-horse, made signals of distress, and cried: “Stop him, good people, for God’s sake stop him, my horse is off!” But these simple persons seeing the beast move along as slowly as a Reichshofrath law-suit, or the Daily Postwagen, could not in the least understand the matter, till I cried as if possessed: “Stop him then, ye blockheads and joltheads; don’t you see that I cannot hold the nag?” But now, to these noodles, the sight of a hard-mouthed horse going off with its rider step by step, seemed ridiculous rather than otherwise; half Vienna gathered itself like a comet-tail behind my beast and me. Prince Kaunitz, the best horseman of the century (the last), pulled up to follow me. I myself sat and swam like a perpendicular piece of drift-ice on my honey-coloured nag, which stalked on, on, step by step: a many-cornered, red-coated letter-carrier was delivering his letters, to the right and left, in the various stories, and he still crossed over before me again, with satirical features, because the nag went along too slowly. The Schwanzschleuderer, or Train-dasher (the person, as you know, who drives along the streets with a huge barrel of water, and besplashes them with a leathern pipe of three ells long from an iron trough), came across the haunches of my horse, and, in the course of his duty, wetted both these and myself in a very cooling manner, though, for my part, I had too much