Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 22 (US).djvu/175

 expecting at every step to awaken the murderous engine, and thus to clap over my still long candle of life the bonsoir, or extinguisher, with my own hand. However, I got off without shot. In the tavern, indeed, there was more than one fool to laugh at me; because, forsooth, what none but a fool could know, this Notice had stood there for the last ten years, without any gun, as guns often do without any notice. But so it is, my Friends, with our game-police, which warns against all things, only not against warnings.

For the rest, throughout the whole stage, I had a constant source of altercation with the coachman, because he grudged stopping perhaps once in the quarter of an hour, when I chose to come out for a natural purpose. Unhappily, in truth, one has little reason to expect water-doctors among the postillion class, since Physicians themselves have so seldom learned from Halter's large Physiology, that a postponement of the above operation, will precipitate devilish stoneware, and at last precipitate the proprietor himself; this stone-manufactory being generally concluded, not by the Lithotomist, but by Death. Had postillions read that Tycho Brahe died like a bombshell by bursting, they would rather pull up for a moment; with such unlooked-for knowledge, they would see it to be reasonable that a man, though expecting some time to carry his death-stone on him, should not incline, for the time being, to carry it in him. Nay, have I not often, at Weimar, in the longest concluding scenes of Schiller, run out with tears in my eyes; purely that, while his Minerva was melting me on the whole, I might not by the Gorgon's head on her breast be partially turned to stone? And did I not return to the weeping playhouse, and fall into the general emotion so much