Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/72

64 trigger, with which, if I but stirred my heel, I should shoot myself off like a forgotten ramrod, into the other world, beyond the verge of Time! The first thing I did was to cramp-down my toe-nails, to bite, and, as it were, eat my self into the ground with them; since I might at least continue in warm life so long as I pegged my body firmly in beside the Atropos-scissors and hangman’s block, which lay beside me; then I endeavoured to recollect by what steps the fiend had let me hither unshot, but in my agony I had perspired the whole of it, and could remember nothing. In the Devil’s village close at hand, there was no dog to be seen and called to, who might have plucked me from the water; and my Brother-in-law and the Postillion were both carousing with full can. However, I summoned my courage and determination; wrote down on a leaf of my pocket-book my last will, the accidental manner of my death, and my dying remembrance of Berga; and then, with full sails, flew helter-skelter through the midst of it the shortest way; expecting at every step to awaken the murderous engine, and thus to clap over my still long candle of life the bonsoir, or extinguisher, with my own hand. However, I got off without shot. In the tavern, indeed, there was mere than one fool to laugh at me; because, forsooth, what none but a fool could know, this Notice had stood there for the last ten years, without any gun, as guns often do without any notice. But so it is, my Friends, with our game-police, which warns against all things, only not against warnings.

For the rest, throughout the whole stage, I had a constant source of altercation with the coachman, because he grudged stopping perhaps once in the quarter of an hour, when I chose to come out for a natural purpose. Unhappily, in truth, one has little reason to expect water-doctors among the postillion class, since Physicians themselves have so seldom learned