Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/214

 public, that for all this no man but Büsching has to answer. Fixlein had, not long ago, among the rubbish of the church letter-room, stumbled on a paper wherein the Geographer had been requesting special information about the statistics of the village. Büsching, it is true, had picked up nothing,—accordingly, indeed, Hukelum, in his Geography, is still omitted altogether;—but this pestilential letter had infected Fixlein with the spring-fever of Ambition, so that his palpitating heart was no longer to be stilled or held in check, except by the assafoetida-emulsion of a review. It is with authorcraft as with love; both of them for decades long one may equally desire and forbear; but is the first spark once thrown into the powder-magazine, it burns to the end of the chapter.

Simply because winter had commenced by the Almanac, the fire must be larger than usual; for warm rooms, like large furs and bear-skin caps, were things which he loved more than you would figure. The dusk, this fair chiaroscuro of the day, this colored foreground of the night, he lengthened out as far as possible, that he might study Christmas discourses therein; and yet could his wife, without scruple, just as he was pacing up and down the room, with the sowing-sheet full of divine word-seeds hung round his shoulder,—hold up to him a spoonful of alegar, that he might try the same in his palate, and decide whether she should yet draw it off. Nay, did he not in all cases, though fonder of roe-fishes himself, order a milter to be drawn from the herring-barrel, because his good-wife liked it better? —

Here light was brought in; and as Winter was just now commencing his glass-painting on the windows, his ice flower-pieces, and his snow-foliage, our Parson felt that it was time to read something cold, which he pleas-