ble, 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 littl