‘Ludere qui nescit campestribus abstinet armis!’ Bandelmeyer sang out.

‘You observed?’ said Major Edelsheim, and received another disconcerting discharge of a Latin line.  The prince frowned and made use of some military slang.  Was his honour now satisfied?  Not a whit.  He certainly could not have kept his sword-point straight, and yet he clamoured to fight on, stamped, and summoned me to assault him, proposed to fight me with his left hand after his right had failed; in short, he was beside himself, an example of the predicament of a man who has given all the provocation and finds himself disabled.  My seconds could have stopped it had they been equal to their duties; instead of which Bandelmeyer, hearing what he deemed an insult to the order of student and scholar, retorted furiously and offensively, and Eckart, out of good-fellowship, joined him, whereat Major Edelsheim, in the act of bandaging the prince’s arm, warned them that he could not pass by an outrage on his uniform.  Count Loepel stept politely forward, and gave Eckart a significant bow.  The latter remarked mockingly, ‘With pleasure and condescension!’ At a murmur of the name of doctor from Edelsheim, the prince damned the doctor until he or I were food for him.  Irritated by the whole scene, and his extravagant vindictiveness, in which light I regarded the cloak of fury he had flung over the shame of his defeat, I called to Bandelmeyer to open his case of pistols and offer them for a settlement.  As the proposal came from me, it was found acceptable.  The major remonstrated with the prince, and expressed to me his regrets and et caeteras of well-meant civility.  He had a hard task to keep out of the hands of Bandelmeyer, who had seized my sword, and wanted vi et armis to defend the cause of Learning and the People against military brigands on the spot.  If I had not fallen we should have had one or two other prostrate bodies.

A silly business on all sides.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

Ask pardon of you, without excusing myself
Habit of antedating his sagacity
He thinks or he chews
If you kneel down, who will decline to put a foot on you? 
It goes at the lifting of the bridegroom’s little finger
Look within, and avoid lying
Mindless, he says, and arrogant
One who studies is not being a fool
The past is our mortal mother, no dead thing
The proper defence for a nation is its history
Then for us the struggle, for him the grief
They seem to me to be educated to conceal their education
We has long overshadowed “I”
Who beguiles so much as Self?