Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/167

 dressed, they are lying up-stairs." I should think, for my own part, that to the reader it must be as little a matter of indifference as it was to the Butcher, whether the hero of such a History appeared before him with an old tattered potlid of a hat, and a pump-sucker and leg-harness pair of boots, or in suitable apparel. In short, before St. John's day, the man was dressed with taste and pomp.

But now came two most peculiarly important papers—at bottom only one, the petition for the Hukelum parsonship—to be elaborated; in regard to which I feel as if I myself must assist.… It were a simple turn, if now at least the assembled public did not pay attention.

In the first place, the Conrector searched out and sorted all the Consistorial and Councillor quittances, or rather the toll-bills of the road-money, which he had been obliged to pay before the toll-gates at the Quintusship and Conrectorship had been thrown open; for the executor of the Schadeck testament had to reimburse him the whole, as his discharge would express it, "to penny and farthing." Another would have summed up his post-excise much more readily; by merely looking what he—owed; as these debt-bills and those toll-bills, like parallel passages, elucidate and confirm each other. But in Fixlein's case, there was a small circumstance of peculiarity at work, which I cannot explain till after what follows.

It grieved him a little that for his two offices he had been obliged to pay and to borrow no larger a sum than 135 florins, 41 kreuzers, and one halfpenny. The legacy, it is true, was to pass directly from the hands of the testamentary executor into those of the Regiments-Quartermaster; but yet he could have liked well had he—for