“Thou surely hast not overlooked the history of the gigantic cluster of grapes, Signore” exclaimed Peterchen, astonished at the apparent hesitation of the Italian. “’Tis the most beautiful of all the legends of the holy book.  Ha! as I live, there is the ass without his rider;—­what has become of the blackguard Antoine Giraud?  The rogue has alighted to swallow a fresh draught from some booth, after draining his own skin to the bottom.  This comes of neglect; a sober man, or at least one of a harder head, should have been put to the part;—­for, look you,’tis a character that need stand at least a gallon, since the rehearsals alone are enough to take a common drinker off his centre.”

The tongue of the bailiff ran on in accompaniment, during the time that the followers of Bacchus were going through with their songs and pageants, and when they disappeared, it gained a louder key, like the “rolling river that murmuring flows and flows for ever,” rising again on the ear, after the din of any adventitious noise has ceased.

“Now we may expect the pretty bride and her maids,” continued Peterchen, winking at his companions, as the ancient gallant is wont to make a parade of his admiration of the fair; “the solemn ceremony is to be pronounced here, before the authorities, as a suitable termination to this happy day.  Ah! my good old friend Melchior, neither of us is the man he was, or these skipping hoydens would not go through their pirouettes without some aid from our arms!  Now, dispose of yourselves, friends; for this is to be no acting, but a downright marriage, and it is meet that we keep a graver air.  How! what means the movement among the officers?”

Peterchen had interrupted himself, for just at that moment the thief-takers entered the square in a body, inclosing in their centre a group, who had the mien of captives too evidently to be mistaken for honest men.  The bailiff was peculiarly an executive officer; one of that class who believe that the enactment of a law is a point of far less interest than its due fulfilment.  Indeed, so far did he push his favorite principle, that he did not hesitate sometimes to suppose shades of meaning in the different ordinances of the great council that existed only in his own brain, but which were, to do him justice, sufficiently convenient to himself in carrying out the constructions which he saw fit to put on his own duties.  The appearance of an affair of justice was unfortunate for the progress of the ceremonies, Peterchen having some such relish for the punishment of rogues, and more especially for such as seemed to be an eternal reproach to the action of the Bernese system by their incorrigible misery and poverty, as an old coachman is proverbially said to retain for the crack of the whip.  All his judicial sympathies were not fully awakened, on the present occasion, however:  the criminals, though far from belonging to the more lucky of their fellow-creatures, not being quite miserable enough