’If you like I will recite it to you—­No?—­Well, I will give you extracts from it upon our line of march.  To proceed, then, with my biographical sketch, which is now very near a conclusion; or, as I should more correctly say, which has very nearly brought me to the present period of time:  I preached that sermon at Rumpelwitz, in which I hope that the Babylonian question was pretty satisfactorily set at rest.  I preached it before the Herr Baron and his noble family, and some officers of distinction who were staying at his castle.  Mr. Doctor Moser of Halle followed me in the evening discourse; but, though his exercise was learned, and he disposed of a passage of Ignatius, which he proved to be a manifest interpolation, I do not think his sermon had the effect which mine produced, and that the Rumpelwitzers much relished it.  After the sermon, all the candidates walked out of church together, and supped lovingly at the “Blue Stag” in Rumpelwitz.

’While so occupied, a waiter came in and said that a person without wished to speak to one of the reverend candidates, “the tall one.”  This could only mean me, for I was a head and shoulders higher than any other reverend gentleman present.  I issued out to see who was the person desiring to hold converse with me, and found a man whom I had no difficulty in recognising as one of the Jewish persuasion.

’"Sir,” said this Hebrew, “I have heard from a friend, who was in your church to-day, the heads of the admirable discourse you pronounced there.  It has affected me deeply, most deeply.  There are only one or two points on which I am yet in doubt, and if your honour could but condescend to enlighten me on these, I think—­I think Solomon Hirsch would be a convert to your eloquence.”

’"What are these points, my good friend?” said I; and I pointed out to him the twenty-four heads of my sermon, asking him in which of these his doubts lay.

’We had been walking up and down before the inn while our conversation took place, but the windows being open, and my comrades having heard the discourse in the morning, requested me, rather peevishly, not to resume it at that period.  I, therefore, moved on with my disciple, and, at his request, began at once the sermon; for my memory is good for anything, and I can repeat any book I have read thrice.

’I poured out, then, under the trees, and in the calm moonlight, that discourse which I had pronounced under the blazing sun of noon.  My Israelite only interrupted me by exclamations indicative of surprise, assent, admiration, and increasing conviction.  “Prodigious!” said he;—­“Wunderschon!” would he remark at the conclusion of some eloquent passage; in a word, he exhausted the complimentary interjections of our language:  and to compliments what man is averse?  I think we must have walked two miles when I got to my third head and my companion begged I would enter his house, which we now neared, and partake of a glass of beer; to which I was never averse.