BOOK II.

CHAPTER I.
GENESIS.

In a psychological point of view, it is perhaps questionable whether from birth and genealogy, how closely scrutinized soever, much insight is to be gained.  Nevertheless, as in every phenomenon the Beginning remains always the most notable moment; so, with regard to any great man, we rest not till, for our scientific profit or not, the whole circumstances of his first appearance in this Planet, and what manner of Public Entry he made, are with utmost completeness rendered manifest.  To the Genesis of our Clothes-Philosopher, then, be this First Chapter consecrated.  Unhappily, indeed, he seems to be of quite obscure extraction; uncertain, we might almost say, whether of any:  so that this Genesis of his can properly be nothing but an Exodus (or transit out of Invisibility into Visibility); whereof the preliminary portion is nowhere forthcoming.

“In the village of Entepfuhl,” thus writes he, in the Bag Libra, on various Papers, which we arrange with difficulty, “dwelt Andreas Futteral and his wife; childless, in still seclusion, and cheerful though now verging towards old age.  Andreas had been grenadier Sergeant, and even regimental Schoolmaster under Frederick the Great; but now, quitting the halbert and ferule for the spade and pruning-hook, cultivated a little Orchard, on the produce of which he, Cincinnatus-like, lived not without dignity.  Fruits, the peach, the apple, the grape, with other varieties came in their season; all which Andreas knew how to sell:  on evenings he smoked largely, or read (as beseemed a regimental Schoolmaster), and talked to neighbors that would listen about the Victory of Rossbach; and how Fritz the Only (der Einzige) had once with his own royal lips spoken to him, had been pleased to say, when Andreas as camp-sentinel demanded the pass-word, ‘Schweig Hund (Peace, hound)!’ before any of his staff-adjutants could answer. ‘Das nenn’ ich mir einen Konig, There is what I call a King,’ would Andreas exclaim:  ’but the smoke of Kunersdorf was still smarting his eyes.’

“Gretchen, the housewife, won like Desdemona by the deeds rather than the looks of her now veteran Othello, lived not in altogether military subordination; for, as Andreas said, ’the womankind will not drill (wer kann die Weiberchen dressiren):’  nevertheless she at heart loved him both for valor and wisdom; to her a Prussian grenadier Sergeant and Regiment’s Schoolmaster was little other than a Cicero and Cid:  what you see, yet cannot see over, is as good as infinite.  Nay, was not Andreas in very deed a man of order, courage, downrightness (Geradheit); that understood Busching’s Geography, had been in the victory of Rossbach, and left for dead in the camisade of Hochkirch?  The good Gretchen, for all her fretting, watched over him and hovered round him as only a true house-mother