off to her lover's dwelling, where she arrived just as the
young lawyer, thanks to the lavish use of naphtha, opened his eyes
again, and the doctors were talking about trepanning. What further took
place may be conceived. Nanni was inconsolable; Rettel, notwithstanding
her betrothal, was sunk in grief; and Monsieur Pickard Leberfink
exclaimed, whilst tears of sorrow ran down his cheeks, "God be merciful
to the man upon whose pate a carpenter's fist falls." The loss of young
Herr Jonathan would be irreparable. At any rate the varnish on his
coffin should be of unsurpassed brightness and blackness; and the
silvering of the skulls and other nice ornaments should baffle all
comparison.

It appeared that Sebastian had escaped out of the hands of a troop of
Bavarian soldiers, whilst they were conducting a band of vagabonds
through the district of Bamberg, and he had found his way into the town
in order to carry out a mad project which he had for a long time been
brooding over in his mind. His career was not that of an abandoned,
vicious criminal; it afforded rather an example of those supremely
frivolous-minded men, who, despite the very admirable qualities with
which Nature has endowed them, give way to every temptation to evil,
and finally sinking to the lowest depths of vice, perish in shame and
misery. In Saxony he had fallen into the hands of a petti-fogging
lawyer, who had made him believe that Master Wacht, when sending him
his patrimonial inheritance, had paid him very much short, and kept
back the remainder for the benefit of his brother Jonathan, to whom he
had promised to give his favourite daughter Nanni to wife. Very likely
the old deceiver had concocted this story out of various utterances of
Sebastian himself. The kindly reader already knows by what violent
means Sebastian set to work to secure his own rights. Immediately after
leaving Master Wacht he had burst into Jonathan's room, where the
latter happened to be sitting at his study table, ordering some
accounts and counting the piles of money which lay heaped up before
him. His clerk sat in the other corner of the room. "Ah! you villain!"
screamed Sebastian in a fury, "there you are sitting over your mammon.
Are you counting what you have robbed me of? Give me here what yon old
rascal has stolen from me and bestowed upon you. You poor, weak thing!
You greedy clutching devil--you!" And when Sebastian strode close up to
him, Jonathan instinctively stretched o