Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/185

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LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN.
169

when she might have seen the Presentation from his Lordship arrive to-day.

The lackey being gone, Fixlein for joy began to grow sceptical—and timorous (wherefore, to prevent filching, he stowed his Presentation securely in his coffer, under keeping of two padlocks); and devout and softened, since he thanked God without scruple for all good that happened to him, and never wrote this Eternal Name but in pulpit characters, and with colored ink; as the Jewish copyists never wrote it except ornamental letters and when newly washed;[1]—and deaf also did the parson grow, so that he scarcely heard the soft wooing-hour of the Actus—for a still softer one beside Thiennette, with its rose-bushes and rose-honey, would not leave his thoughts. He who of old, when Fortune made a wry face at him, was wont, like children in their sport at one another, to laugh at her so long till she herself was obliged to begin smiling—he was now flying as on a huge see-saw higher and higher, quicker and quicker aloft.

But before the Actus, let us examine the Schadock Lawyer. Fixlein instead of Füchslein[2] he had written from uncertainty about the spelling of the name; the more naturally as in transcribing the Rittmeisterinn's will the former had occurred so often. Von, this triumphal arch, he durst not set up before Füchslein's new name, because Aufhammer forbade it, considering Hans Füchslein as a mushroom, who had no right to vons and titles of nobility, for all his patents. In fine, the Presentation-writer was possessed with Campe's[3] whim of Germaniz-

  1. Eichhorn's Einleitung ins A. T. (Introduction to the Old Testament), Vol. II.
  2. Both have the same sound. Füchslein means Foxling, Fox-whelp,—Ed.
  3. Campe, a German philologist, who, along with several others of