more and more deeply wrinkled, his broken angular back bends into sharper angles and corners, his pointed elbows dig beds for themselves in the oak table, his skinny fingers bury themselves in his cheeks, his piggish grey eyes get redder over manuscripts, Latin, Greek, or mediaeval.  He falls into raptures, he smacks his lips, he licks his chops like a cat over a dainty dish, and then he throws himself upon that dirty litter, with his knees up to his chin, and he thinks he has had a delightful day!  Oh, Providence of God, is a man’s duty best done, are his responsibilities best discharged, at the top or at the bottom of the scale of human life?”

But the snow was melting away from my legs, the balmy warmth of the stove was shedding a pleasant influence over my feelings, and I felt myself reviving in this mixed atmosphere of tobacco-smoke and burning pine-wood.

Knapwurst gravely laid his pipe on the table, and reverently spreading his hand upon the folio, said in a voice that seemed to issue from the bottom of his consciousness; or, if you like it better, from the bottom of a twenty-gallon cask—­

“Doctor Fritz, here is the law and the prophets!”

“How so? what do you mean?”

“Parchment—­old parchment—­that is what I love!  These old yellow, rusty, worm-eaten leaves are all that is left to us of the past, from the days of Charlemagne until this day.  The oldest families disappear, the old parchments remain.  Where would be the glory of the Hohenstauffens, the Leiningens, the Nidecks, and of so many other families of renown?  Where would be the fame of their titles, their deeds of arms, their magnificent armour, their expeditions to the Holy Land, their alliances, their claims to remote antiquity, their conquests once complete, now long ago annulled?  Where would be all those grand claims to historic fame without these parchments?  Nowhere at all.  Those high and mighty barons, those great dukes and princes, would be as if they had never been—­they and everything that related to them far and near.  Their strong castles, their palaces, their fortresses fall and moulder away into masses of ruin, vague remembrancers!  Of all that greatness one monument alone remains—­the chronicles, the songs of bards and minnesingers.  Parchment alone remains!”

He sat silent for a moment, and then pursued his reflections.

“And in those distant times, while knights and squires rode out to war, and fought and conquered or fought and fell over the possession of a nook in a forest, or a title, or a smaller matter still, with what scorn and contempt did they not look down upon the wretched little scribbler, the man of mere letters and jargon, half-clothed in untanned hides, his only weapon an inkhorn at his belt, his pennon the feather of a goosequill!  How they laughed at him, calling him an atom or a flea, good for nothing!  ’He does nothing, he cannot even collect our taxes, or look after our estates, whilst we bold riders, armed