with new ideas of primogeniture,–his brother was more dismembered with agony than the turkey-cock in the air. The Evangelist went on: "With the Jews, too, the bestial first-born, because it can never offer a sacrifice, has the best food, and is holy and inviolable,–the rest of the cattle belong to the class of younger sons." ...

–Thereupon he suddenly and smilingly pronounced the compliment: "Only my friend here with the turkey-cock makes the happiest exception to my assertion, and his respected brother with the staff there the wretchedest; they are, however, twins, and he is only a quarter of an hour older than the deaf one." He turned composedly to him of the staff, who had already mobilized^[19] his face for war, "Am I not right, a quarter of an hour older?"

"Yes, may God punish me," said he, "if I am not. What says my brother?"

The Apothecary, fainting, had to let fall the dividend on the fork, though it had already been lightened by the cutting off of successive quotients. The bellows-blower took a flying survey of all faces, and detected on all a silent scepticism, which the page by his cold assurances made still more legible. "There is nothing in the whole joke," said Zeusel in a low tone, "that can possibly interest any one."

As the bellows-blower could not get hold, through his long auricular organ, of the low murmured exception,–but he did not see how even then he was going to maintain his case and his right of primogeniture,–he entered upon his proof, and fetched out four long curses, as answering to just so many syllogistic figures, and bent his head before his brother, that he might hand in over it his replication. The Apothecary, who wanted to invalidate, not the primogeniture, but only the claim to be his brother, and who, on account of doubt as to his title, did not care to address him, said imploringly to Matthieu, "Concede the point to him, for he does not know at all what we have hitherto been talking of."

Quickly and abruptly, then, but with an incredulous look, the page said to him, "You shall be right, my friend," and added, under pretence of wishing to divert him, "You look right fresh and young."

"By heaven!" replied he, flaming up, "he there is younger; but he came behind me, as a fellow-traveller, into the world in the form of a tobacco-pouch: he is woven and twisted together out of the little beggar-men^[20] that fell off from me."

The bellows-blower now fired off all the cannons on the wall of his head, exasperated by the vinegar-glances and poisonous looks and inaudibleness of his blood-friend: he therefore stretched out his thumb and his little finger, and set them like the feet of a pair of compasses on his own face by way of measuring it; then he set out to apply the two as a long-measure to the face of his blood-friend: he would then, as man is ten faces long, have held his own and the other face opposite each other, and then from their difference in measurement have easily inferred their respective statures; but the Apothecary wabbled, and the bellows-blower quite incorrectly planted his thumb above the jawbone. Here the thumb, which sought to press itself into the soft cheek, was stopped by something hard and round, and the servant of the bellows, by the slipping down of the thumb upon the jaw, propelled out of the mouth a ball of wax with which the Apothecary had stuffed out as with a padding his sunken cheeks, in order to swell up the inlaid sculpture of his visage into relievo. The emerging ball knocked over, like a nine-pin ball, the Apothecary, i. e. upset his equanimity, and with flashing eyes he said to the deaf one, who was now on the point of absolutely striding on to a history of his bald head, only this much: "You, man, have no bringing up, and your elder brother must plane you down first."

But as the Calcant^[21] had already made some headway in the natural history of the baldhead, Zeusel hurried off with the excuse that the Court-Physician Horion was awaiting him this evening. The most serious of the Englishmen stepped up very near to him and said: "Commend me to the Doctor, and as he makes such good cures, tell him, in my name, you are a great fool."

Hardly had he got out of the village, when the Calcant took pity on the Emigrant, and would fain have done with his history of the bald head. The Evangelist, therefore, despatched him after the enraged twin, to catch him now in the dark; and took up himself in his place the historic thread. On an evening–so the story ran–when the court was not at the play, the Court Apothecary–Heaven knows how–poked out his nut-cracker-face from one of the first boxes. Matthieu, who was then still page, posted the bellows-blower in the zenith of his peruke, namely, in the gallery exactly above him. The Calcant let down from above by an invisible horsehair a little hook, which hung like a bird of prey over the out-looking peruke, which I hold to be an ideal of hair. For it seemed to have grown out from the head (from which locks and vergette^[22] had long since fallen off) as an indigene and shoot, and no one took it for an adopted for. The bellows-blower let the hook swing and sway like a pendulum above the peruke, till such time as there was a certainty of its having fastened into the vergette. Forthwith he made use of his hands as a drayman's windlass, and lifted up (as the frost does other growths) the whole frisure by the roots, and slowly drew the pig-tail wig like an ascending hair-balloon up into the air. The pit and the chief-lover and the lamplighter were turned by astonishment into lumps of ice, as they saw the tailed comet go up in right ascension to the gallery. Upon the Apothecary, who felt his head uncovered and blown upon by a cold wind, the few natural hairs lifted themselves up with terror, like the artificial ones, and when he turned round with his bald skull to look after the lifting of his head of hair on the cross, his twin-brother (in order not to be discovered) let the whole hairy meteor, which wanted to go after the hair of Berenice^[23] in heaven, actually fall down before his face among the people, and looked composedly down at its culmination in the nadir, like the rest of the gallery.