to speak. "You don't feel very well, because
Florian's come back, and you don't want to be seen in the street. I've
heard all about the fuss he had with the geometer last night. Now, just
for spite, you must go to the Horb Garden to-day with the geometer.
That's what I tell you: and one word's as good as a thousand."

"I'm sick."

"No use. Go up-stairs and dress yourself, or I'll measure your clothes
with this yardstick."

"Let him talk," said the tailor's wife, who had entered by this time:
"what he says is for the mice to dance by. Crescence, if you don't feel
well, stay at home. If it depended on him, you wouldn't have a shred of
clothes to put on, good or bad: all he can do is to put his feet under
the table three times a day and get himself fed like a billet of
soldiers."

The tailor advanced upon Crescence; but his wife posted herself in
front of her, clenched her fists, and scared her liege-lord into a
corner.

These people were fresh from church, where they had prayed and sung of
love, peace, and happiness. Their hymn-books were still in their hands,
and already had Discord resumed its reign.

Indeed, we have stumbled upon a peculiar household. The mother had been
the parson's cook, and had married the tailor rather suddenly.
Crescence was her oldest child, and she had, besides, a son and a
daughter. She still wore citizen's dress, with the sole exception of
the black cap of the peasant-woman, which, from its superiority in
cheapness to the lace caps of the votaries of Paris, seems destined to
survive all other traces of the peculiar costume of the peasantry.

During the early part of their wedded life they lived together very
harmoniously; for where there is plenty of all things needful none but
the most quarrelsome contract habits of dispute. Such a state of things
is entitled, among the refined as well as among the vulgar, a happy
match!

The tailor worked at his trade, and his wife kept a little shop for the
sale of groceries and odds and ends.

But what is more subject to the fashions than those kings of fashion,
the tailors? Balt only worked for the gentlefolks and for the Jews, who
also wore citizens' dress: make peasants' clothes he could not,--and
would not, for he had been to Berlin. New competitors established
themselves in the village and in the neighborhood, and Balt would run
about for days without finding work.

This induced him to enter upon a speculation, in which we find him
stil