Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/195

 would at most be the twenty-one-thousand prize, namely, the inaugural discourse itself.

And this prize our Zebedäus actually drew on Sunday; he preached,—he preached with unction, he did it before the crowding, rustling press of people; before his Guardian, and before the Lord of Aufhammer, the godfather of the priest and the dog;—a flock, with whom in childhood he had driven out the Castle herds about the pasture, he was now, himself a spiritual sheep-smearer, leading out to pasture;—he was standing to the ankles among Candidates and Schoolmasters, for to-day (what none of them could) at the altar, with the nail of his finger, he might scratch a large cross in the air, baptisms and marriages not once mentioned. … I believe I should feel less scrupulous than I do to checker this sun-shiny esplanade with that thin shadow of the grave which the preacher threw over it, when, in the application, with wet, heavy eyes, he looked round over the mute, attentive church, as if in some corner of it he would seek the mouldering teacher of his youth and of this congregation, who without, under the white tombstone, the wrong-side of life, had laid away the garment of his pious spirit. And when he, himself hurried on by the internal stream, inexpressibly softened by the further recollections of his own fear of death on this day, of his life now overspread with flowers and benefits, of his entombed benefactress resting here in her narrow bed,—when he now, before the dissolving countenance of her friend, his Thiennette, overpowered, motionless, and weeping, looked down from the pulpit to the door of the Schadeck vault, and said: "Thanks, thou pious soul, for the good thou hast done to this flock and to their new teacher; and, in the fulness of time, may the dust of thy