superior stature, and minded to make sport for himself, or perhaps profit, were it with murder, continues to advance; ever assailing me with his importunate train-oil breath; and now has advanced, till we stand both on the verge of the rock, the deep Sea rippling greedily down below.  What argument will avail?  On the thick Hyperborean, cherubic reasoning, seraphic eloquence were lost.  Prepared for such extremity, I, deftly enough, whisk aside one step; draw out, from my interior reservoirs, a sufficient Birmingham Horse-pistol, and say, ’Be so obliging as retire, Friend (Er ziehe sich zuruck, Freund), and with promptitude!’ This logic even the Hyperborean understands:  fast enough, with apologetic, petitionary growl, he sidles off; and, except for suicidal as well as homicidal purposes, need not return.

“Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder:  that it makes all men alike tall.  Nay, if thou be cooler, cleverer than I, if thou have more Mind, though all but no Body whatever, then canst thou kill me first, and art the taller.  Hereby, at last, is the Goliath powerless, and the David resistless; savage Animalism is nothing, inventive Spiritualism is all.

“With respect to Duels, indeed, I have my own ideas.  Few things, in this so surprising world, strike me with more surprise.  Two little visual Spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough cohesion in the midst of the UNFATHOMABLE, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, very soon,—­make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl round; and, simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another into Dissolution; and off-hand become Air, and Non-extant!  Deuce on it (verdammt), the little spitfires!—­Nay, I think with old Hugo von Trimberg:  ’God must needs laugh outright, could such a thing be, to see his wondrous Manikins here below.’”

But amid these specialties, let us not forget the great generality, which is our chief quest here:  How prospered the inner man of Teufelsdrockh, under so much outward shifting!  Does Legion still lurk in him, though repressed; or has he exorcised that Devil’s Brood?  We can answer that the symptoms continue promising.  Experience is the grand spiritual Doctor; and with him Teufelsdrockh has now been long a patient, swallowing many a bitter bolus.  Unless our poor Friend belong to the numerous class of Incurables, which seems not likely, some cure will doubtless be effected.  We should rather say that Legion, or the Satanic School, was now pretty well extirpated and cast out, but next to nothing introduced in its room; whereby the heart remains, for the while, in a quiet but no comfortable state.