Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 22 (US).djvu/55

 less and mad; yet, notwithstanding this, it is meant for anything but incoherent, or even allegorical, and it is, in one word, literally true. Had I known, however, that the glorious love-story, to which I owe my existence, would have pleased you so ill, I might have given you a little of the news my brother brought me on his visit yesterday."

"How, how is this? Have you a brother, then, Heir Archivarius? Where is he? Where lives he? In his Majesty's service too? Or perhaps a private scholar?" cried the company from all quarters.

"No!" replied the Archivarius, quite cool, and composedly taking a pinch of snuff, "he has joined the bad side; he has gone over to the Dragons."

"What do you please to mean, dear Herr Archivarius?" cried Registrator Heerbrand: "Over to the Dragons?"—"Over to the Dragons?" resounded like an echo from all hands.

"Yes, over to the Dragons," continued Archivarius Lindhorst: "it was sheer desperation, I believe. You know, gentlemen, my father died a short while ago; it is but three hundred and eighty-five years since at most, and I am still in mournings for it. He had left me, his favourite son, a fine onyx; this onyx, right or wrong, my brother would have: we quarrelled about it, over my father's corpse; in such unseemly wise that the good man started up, out of all patience, and threw my wicked brother down stairs. This stuck in our brother's stomach, and so without loss of time he went over to the Dragons. At present, he keeps in a cypress wood, not far from Tunis: he has got a famous mystic carbuncle to watch there, which a dog of a necromancer, who has set up a summer-house in Lapland, has an eye to; so my poor brother only gets away for a quarter of an hour or so, when the necromancer happens to be out looking after the salamander-bed in his garden, and then he tells me in all haste what good news there are about the Springs of the Nile."