Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/59

Rh relatively best lying completed before me; when, to my terror, I observed, that, in this paper, I had introduced above thirty dashes, or breaks, in the middle of my sentences! Nowadays, alas, these stings shoot forth involuntarily from learned pens, as from the tails of wasps. I debated long within myself whether a private scholar could justly be entitled to approach a minister with dashes,—greatly as this level interlineation of thoughts, these horizontal note-marks of poetical music-pieces, and these rope-ladders or Achilles’ tendons of philosophical see-pieces, are at present fashionable and indispensable: but, at last, I was obliged (as erasures may offend people of quality) to write my best proof-petition over again; and then to afflict myself for another quarter of an hour over the name Attila Schmelzle, seeing it is always my principle that this and the address of the letter, the two cardinal points of the whole, can never be written legibly enough.

The 22d of July, or Wednesday, about five in the afternoon, was now, by the way-bill of the regular Post-coach, irrevocably fixed for my departure. I had still half a day to order my house; from which, for two nights and two days and a half, my breast, its breastwork and palisado, was now, along with my Self, to be withdrawn. Besides this, my good wife Bergelchen, as I call my Teutoberga, was immediately to travel after me, on Friday the 24th, in order to see and to make purchases at the yearly Fair; nay, she was ready to have gone along with me, the faithful spouse. I therefore assembled my little knot of domestics, and promulgated to them the Household Law and Valedictory Rescript, which, after my departure, in the first place before the outset of my wife, and in the second place after this outset, they had rigorously to obey; explaining to them especially whatever, in case of conflagrations, house-breakings, thunder-storms, or transits of troops, it would behove them to do. To my wife I delivered an inventory of the best