! What will people say? What will
His Excellency, the minister, say? His Excellency will think I have had
my face painted green from motives of mere worldly vanity! Ah! it's all
over with me. I shall be suspended from my official functions. The
Government will never hear of such a thing as a Clerk of the Privy
Chancery with a green face. Wretched man that I am; what's to become of
me?"

"Come, come, Tussmann!" the Goldsmith said; "don't make such a fuss. I
have no doubt there's hope for you yet, if you pull yourself together,
and get rid of this idiotic notion of marrying Miss Bosswinkel."

In answer to this, Tussmann and Bosswinkel cried out together, in what
is termed on the lyric stage "_ensemble_"--

"I can't."

"He shan't."

The Goldsmith fixed his sparkling, penetrating eyes on the two of them;
but just as he was going to burst out at them, the door opened, and in
came Manasseh, with his nephew, Baron Benjamin Duemmerl, from Vienna.
"Benjie" went straight up to Albertine--who had never seen him in her
life before--and said, in a disagreeable, drawling tone, as he took her
hand--

"I have come here in person, dear Miss Bosswinkel, to lay myself at
your feet. Of course you know that is a mere _facon de parler_. Baron
Duemmerl doesn't really lay himself at anybody's feet, not even at the
Emperor's. What I mean is--let me have a kiss."

So saying, he went nearer to Albertine, and bent down towards her.

But, at that moment, a something happened which neither he nor anybody
else--except the Goldsmith--anticipated, and which caused them all much
alarm. Benjie's rather sizeable nose suddenly shot forward to such a
length that, passing beyond Albertine's face, it struck the opposite
wall of the room with a tremendous, resounding bang. He started back a
step or two, and his nose at once drew in to its ordinary dimensions.
He approached Albertine again, with exactly the same result. To make a
long tale short, his nose kept on shooting in and out like a trombone.

"Cursed necromancer!" Manasseh roared; and took a thin cord, fastened
in a sort of knot, out of his pocket, which he threw to the
Commissionsrath, crying--"Throw that about the brute's neck--the
Goldsmith, I mean--and then drag him out of the room. Never mind about
ceremony. Do as I tell you. All will be right then."

The Commissionsrath took hold of the noose, but instead of throwing it
about the Goldsmith's neck, he threw it over the Jew's; and immedi