morning service; Lazarus with his dogs; his own long coffin; innumerable
decapitations; the Sorrows of Werther; a miniature field of battle; and
finally, himself and his own melancholy condition at this moment, itself
enough to melt any heart, condemned as he was in the bloom of youth by
the second clause of Van der Kabel's will to tribulation, and tears, and
struggles:--Well done, Flacks! Three strokes more with the pump-handle,
and the water is pumped up and the house along with it.

Meantime Glantz, the ecclesiastical councillor, proceeded in his
pathetic harangue--'Oh, Kabel, my Kabel!' he ejaculated, and almost wept
with joy at the near approach of his tears, 'the time shall come that by
the side of thy loving breast, covered with earth, mine also shall lie
mouldering and in cor----' _ruption_ he would have said; but Flacks,
starting up in trouble, and with eyes overflowing, threw a hasty glance
around him, and said, 'With submission, gentlemen, to the best of my
belief I am weeping.' Then sitting down, with great satisfaction he
allowed the tears to stream down his face; that done, he soon recovered
his cheerfulness and his _aridity_. Glantz the councillor thus saw the
prize fished away before his eyes--those very eyes which he had already
brought into an _Accessit_,[19] or inchoate state of humidity; this
vexed him: and his mortification was the greater on thinking of his own
pathetic exertions, and the abortive appetite for the prize which he had
thus uttered in words as ineffectual as his own sermons; and at this
moment he was ready to weep for spite--and 'to weep the more because he
wept in vain.' As to Flacks, a protocol was immediately drawn up of his
watery compliance with the will of Van der Kabel: and the messuage in
Dog-street was knocked down to him for ever. The Mayor adjudged it to
the poor devil with all his heart: indeed, this was the first occasion
ever known in Haslau, on which the tears of a schoolmaster and a curate
had converted themselves--not into mere amber that incloses only a
worthless insect, like the tears of Heliodes, but like those of the
goddess Freia, into heavy gold. Glantz congratulated Flacks very
warmly; and observed with a smiling air, that possibly he had himself
lent him a helping hand by his pathetic address. As to the others, the
separation between them and Flacks was too palpable, in the mortifying
distinction of _wet_ and _dry_, to allow of any cordiality between them;
and