Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/143

 Fixlein might now, at any hour he liked, lay hold of fifty florins Frankish, and clutch the pedagogic sceptre, and become coadjutor of the Rector, that is, Conrector. We may assert, that it is with debts, as with proportions in Architecture; of which Wolf has shown that those are the best which can be expressed in the smallest numbers. Nevertheless, the Quartermaster cheerfully took learned men under his arm; for the notion that his debtor would decease in his thirty-second year, and that so Death, as creditor in the first rank, must be paid his Debt of Nature, before the other creditors could come forward with their debts—this notion he named stuff and old-wifery; he was neither Superstitious nor Fanatical, and he walked by firm principles of action, such as the common man much oftener has than your vaporing man of letters, or your empty, dainty man of rank.

As it is but a few clear Ladydays, warm Mayday-nights, at the most a few odorous Rose-weeks, which I am digging from this Fixleinic Life, embedded in the dross of week-day cares; and as if they were so many veins of silver, am separating, stamping, smelting, and burnishing for the reader,—I must now travel on with the stream, his history to Cantata-Sunday, 1792, before I can gather a few handfuls of this gold-dust, to carry in and wash in my biographical gold-hut. That Sunday, on the contrary, is very metalliferous; do but consider that Fixlein is yet uncertain (the ashes of the Church-books not being legible) whether it is conducting him into his thirty-second or his thirty-third year.

From Christmas till then he did nothing, but simply became Conrector. The new chair of office was a Sunaltar, on which, from his Quintus-ashes, a young Phoenix combined itself together. Great changes—in offices,