Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/102

 honored these wrappages and hulls of our interior, not as an Elegant, or a Critic of Beauty, but because it was not possible for him to despise aught which he saw others honoring. Further, the good mother read to him, as it were, the monumental inscription of his father, who had sunk into the arms of Death in the thirty-second year of his age, from a cause which I explain not here, but in a future Letter-box, having too much affection for the reader. Our Quintus could not sate himself with hearing of his father.

The fairest piece of news was, that Fräulein Thiennette had sent word to-day, " he might visit Her Ladyship tomorrow, as My Lord, his godfather, was to be absent in town." This, however, I must explain. Old Auf hammer was called Egidius, and was Fixlein's godfather; but he—though the Rittmeisterinn duly covered the cradle of the child with nightly offerings, with flesh-tithes and grain-tithes—had frugally made him no christening present, except that of his name, which proved to be the very balefullest. For, our Egidius Fixlein, with his Shock, which, by reason of the French convulsions, had, in company with other emigrants, run off from Nantes, was but lately returned from college—when he and his dog, as ill-luck would have it, went to walk in the Hukelum wood. Now, as the Quintus was ever and anon crying out to his attendant: "Coosh, Schil" (Couche Gilles), it must apparently have been the Devil that had just then planted the Lord of Aufhammer among the trees and bushes in such a way, that this whole travestying and docking of his name—for Gilles means Egidius—must fall directly into his ear. Fixlein could neither speak French, nor any offence to mortal; he knew not head or tail of what couche signified; a word, which, in Paris,