Entry he made, are with utmost completeness rendered
manifest. To the Genesis of our Clothes-Philosopher, then, be this
First Chapter consecrated. Unhappily, indeed, he seems to be of quite
obscure extraction; uncertain, we might almost say, whether of any: so
that this Genesis of his can properly be nothing but an Exodus (or
transit out of Invisibility into Visibility); whereof the preliminary
portion is nowhere forthcoming.

'In the village of Entepfuhl,' thus writes he, in the Bag _Libra_, on
various Papers, which we arrange with difficulty, 'dwelt Andreas
Futteral and his wife; childless, in still seclusion, and cheerful
though now verging towards old age. Andreas had been grenadier
Sergeant, and even regimental Schoolmaster under Frederick the Great;
but now, quitting the halbert and ferule for the spade and
pruning-hook, cultivated a little Orchard, on the produce of which he,
Cincinnatus-like, lived not without dignity. Fruits, the peach, the
apple, the grape, with other varieties came in their season; all which
Andreas knew how to sell: on evenings he smoked largely, or read (as
beseemed a regimental Schoolmaster), and talked to neighbours that
would listen about the Victory of Rossbach; and how Fritz the Only
(_der Einzige_) had once with his own royal lips spoken to him, had
been pleased to say, when Andreas as camp-sentinel demanded the
pass-word, "_Schweig Hund_ (Peace, hound)!" before any of his
staff-adjutants could answer. "_Das nenn' ich mir einen Koenig_, There
is what I call a King," would Andreas exclaim: "but the smoke of
Kunersdorf was still smarting his eyes."

'Gretchen, the housewife, won like Desdemona by the deeds rather than
the looks of her now veteran Othello, lived not in altogether military
subordination; for, as Andreas said, "the womankind will not drill
(_wer kann die Weiberchen dressiren_)": nevertheless she at heart
loved him both for valour and wisdom; to her a Prussian grenadier
Sergeant and Regiment's Schoolmaster was little other than a Cicero
and Cid: what you see, yet cannot see over, is as good as infinite.
Nay, was not Andreas in very deed a man of order, courage,
downrightness (_Geradheit_); that understood Buesching's _Geography_,
had been in the victory of Rossbach, and left for dead in the camisade
of Hochkirch? The good Gretchen, for all her fretting, watched over
him and hovered round him as only a true housemother can: assiduously
she cooked and sewed and scoured for