Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/192

 Latin epistles with his scholars; and in the Quinta had taught not with Napier's Rods (or rods of a sharper description), but with sticks of barley-sugar.

To-day his churchyard appeared to him so solemn and festive, that he wondered (though it was Monday) why his parishioners were not in their holiday, but merely in their week-day drapery. Under the door of the Parsonage stood a weeping woman; for she was too happy, and he was her—son. Yet the mother, in the height of her emotion, contrives quite readily to call upon the carriers, while disloading, not to twist off the four corner globes from the old Frankish chest of drawers. Her son now appeared to her as venerable as if he had sat for one of the copperplates in her pictured Bible; and that simply because he had cast off his pedagogue hair-cue, as the ripening tadpole does its tail; and was now standing in a clerical periwig before her; he was now a Comet, soaring away from the profane Earth, and had accordingly changed from a stella caudata into a stella crinita.

His bride also had, on former days, given sedulous assistance in this new improved edition of his house, and labored faithfully among the other furnishers and furbishers. But to-day she kept aloof; for she was too good to forget the maiden in the bride. Love, like men, dies oftener of excess than of hunger; it lives on love, but it resembles those Alpine flowers which feed themselves by suction from the wet clouds, and die if you besprinkle them.

At length the Parson is settled, and of course he must—for I know my fair readers, who are bent on it as if they were bridemaids—without delay get married. But he may not; before Ascension-day there can nothing be done, and till then are full four weeks and a half. The