SEVENTH SECTION.

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Robisch.--The Starling.--A Lamb in the Place of the Above-Mentioned Cat

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      After such an abduction they confined Gustavus's theatre and pleasure-ground strictly within the wall of the castle; into the waving grain-fields and the hamlet of Auenthal, which lay at about a seventeenth of a German mile distant, he could only look. This flowery mountain island he cruised round all day long, in order to knock down every red chafer, to twist off every marbled snail-house from its leaf, and generally to shut up everything that skipped about on six feet in the prison he had prepared for it. At the expense of his inexperienced fingers, he even undertook at first to pull the bee by the hinder part of the body out of its cup of joy. The motley prisoners he now crowded together (as princes do all classes of men into one metropolis) into a beautiful Solomon's-temple, or into a silver-plated Noah's-ark of pasteboard, with more windows than walls. The architect of this fourth temple of Solomon was not, as with the first, the Devil or the Worm Lis,^[14] but a human being, who could easily be likened to both, the so-called princely rat-catcher Robisch. This vassal of the Captain visited annually the best chambers and gardens of the whole land, in order to cleanse both, not so much of their worst as of their least inmates--mice and moles. I will not exactly assure the learned Republic that this mouse-butcher dispatched as many subterranean moles out of the world as there are scribbling ones that annually come in, to set themselves on their hind feet and then with their fore feet, which in both kinds of moles resemble human hands, in the book stores and at the Leipsic trade-sale, throw up their mole-hills as little Parnassus-mountains;--meanwhile, Robisch was paid exactly as if the chamber-hunter had cleared out all vermin. For the people thought, if one should provoke this cup-poisoner of the rodents, instead of paying him, he would imitate the miracles of Moses, and redouble, by colonies left behind him, the vermin which one took out of his royal and penal jurisdiction. I will take my hands off from this dirty soul, whose orbit, I hope, may never bring him nearer my Gustavus, when I have recorded that he was often in the house of the Falkenbergs; that, when there were strangers there, he acted as extra and occasional domestic, and when wild game, in the shape of recruits, was to be caught, as drawing-hound to the Captain, and that he pressed himself and his wares upon little Gustavus. Such a hooking-on to children, without parental childlikeness, is ambiguous. Children, however, have a special love for servants, and Gustavus particularly, who, indeed, could not, even at a later period, possibly hate any one whom he had loved in his childhood; all the misdeeds which Robisch might have committed against him could not have snapped asunder the bond of that gratitude he felt for the gift of the miserable insect block-house which depopulated the wall.

      Whatever lived and buzzed in the Solomon's-castle-church must be fed with sugar, because children look upon that as both lunch and dessert; and the finest inmates would have starved to death had not their overseer, Gustavus, received from the chamber-hunter, as a further present, a starling; for this starling he let hop into the Pantheon, and eat everything which itself had nothing to eat.... If I have here hid away under the wing-sheaths of the insects, and in the bill of the starling the most just reflections and the boldest hints, I hope the reader will cleverly find them there.

      Except myself, no one, perhaps, had Gustavus's name in his bill so often as the starling, who, like court people, never had anything in his head but a nomen proprium. The little fellow thought the starling thought, and was a man as much as Robisch, and loved him for all he did; therefore, he could not be satisfied with listening to him and loving everything about him. In fact, there was nothing which he could love and hug enough. The farmer had for that purpose given him for a companion a black lamb, which he led and lured around the wall with a red ribbon and a crust of bread. The lamb, like a village comedian, had to play all parts. At one time he must be the Genius, then the poodle; now Gustavus and now Robisch. Thus did our little friend play solo his first earthly parts, and was at once manager, prompter, and theatre poet. Such comedies as children make for themselves are a thousand times more profitable than those they act, even though they came out of Weisse's writing-desk; in our day, besides, when the whole man is a figurant, his virtue a dramatic part, and his sensibility lyric poetry, this wrenching of children's souls is particularly dangerous. However, this is also, sometimes, not true; for I, myself, acted the complete sharper, to be sure only once, twice, or thrice in my life, but that was even before I had gone to my first confession.

      The decree which forbade his going down the castle hill, differed honorably from the decrees of our transcendant parents, the magistracy, in this respect, that it was, in the first place, made known to the party concerned, and, secondly, that it was maintained for at least a fortnight. Gustavus would have given his life to have taken himself and his lamb from the wall down to the foot of the mountain. Now, as the Captain knew, from Quistorp's Juridical Contributions, that one may substitute for close confinement within the walls, the larger one of gaol limits, or the bounds of the district, accordingly he dictated the latter punishment instead of the former, and said: "Can not one give the lamb in charge of the farmer's Regel (Regina), so long as she tends the flock on the hillside? So far as I am concerned, the youngster may join in driving, if I only have him always in sight." I must still wait to see what the Imperial Knighthood will say or write upon this, viz., that an honorary member thereof, my hero, at four o'clock in the afternoon regularly twisted off a long hazel wand, and therewith transformed himself into a young ox-driver, and by the side of Strössner's eleven-year-old Regina, drove out the sheep and cattle and the lamb led by the ribbon with such pride and such Jupiter's eyebrows, that any one could easily see he directed the whole stall, and challenged the imperial chivalry at this moment to come and see him.

      Only in the Millenial Kingdom are there such afternoons as Gustavus enjoyed, as in the lap of the earth, on that eminence. My father should have sent me to a drawing school: could I not now have caught and mirrored the whole landscape in my stream of colors instead of a stream of ink? Verily, I could image before the eyes of