Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/87

Rh my heart were wearied with the foreign busy day; no one here said a kind word to me, which he did not hope to put in the bill. Friends! I languished for my friend, whose heart would pour out its blood as a balsam for a second heart; I cursed my over-prudent regulations, and wished that, to have the good Berga at my side, I had given up the stupid houseware to all thieves and fires whatsoever: as I walked to and fro, it seemed to me easier and easier to become all things, an Exchequer-Rath, an Excise-Rath, any Rath in the world, and whatever she required when she came.

“See thou take thy pleasure in the town!” had Bergelchen kept saying the whole week through. But how, without her, can I take any? Our tears of sorrow friends dry up, and accompany with their own: but our tears of joy we find most readily repeated in the eyes of our wives. Pardon me, good Friends, these libations of my sensibility; I am but showing you my heart and my Berga. If I need an Absolution-merchant, the Pontac-merchant is the man.

Yet the wine did not take from me the good sense to look under the bed, before going into it, and examine whether any one was lurking there; for example, the Dwarf, or the Rat-catcher, or the Legations-Rath; also to shove the key under the latch (which I reckon the best bolting arrangement of all), and then, by way of farther assurance, to bore my night-screws into the door, and pile all the chairs in a heap behind it; and, lastly, to keep on my breeches and shoes, wishing absolutely to have no care upon my mind.

But I had still other precautions to take in regard to sleep-walking. To me it has always been incomprehensible how so