Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/63

Rh would not study me and my properties and accidents, to entangle me in their snares, no man could be my surety. In strange places, I even, out of prudence, avoid looking long up at any jail-window; because some lozel, sitting behind the bars, may in a moment call down out of mere malice: “How goes it, comrade Schmelzle?” or farther, because any lurking catchpole may fancy I am planning a rescue for some confederate above. From another sort of prudence, little different from this, I also make a point of never turning round when any booby calls, Thief! behind me.

As to the Dwarf himself, I had no objection to his travelling with me whithersoever he pleased; but he thought to raise a particular delectation in our minds, by promising that his Pollux and Brother in Trade, an extraordinary Giant, who was also making for the Fair to exhibit himself, would by midnight, with his elephantine pace, infallibly overtake the coach, and plant himself among us, or behind on the outside. Both these noodles, it appeared, are in Jhe habit of going in company to fairs, as reciprocal exaggerators of opposite magnitudes: the Dwarf is the convex magnifying-glass of the Giant, the Giant the concave diminishing-glass of the Dwarf. Nobody expressed much joy at the prospective arrival of this Anti-dwarf, except my brother-in-law, who (if I may venture on a play of words) seems made, like a clock, solely for the purpose of striking, and once actually said to me: “That if in the Upper world he could not get a soul to curry and towzle by a time, he would rather go to the Under, where most probably there would be plenty of cuffing and to spare.” The Ratcatcher, besides the circumstance that no man can prepossess us much in his favour, who lives solely by poisoning, like this Destroying Angel of rats, this mouse-Atropos; and also, which is still worse, that such a fellow bids fair to become an increaser of the vermin