othing to boast of but her charms. Ay
verily, as the song says, love can make black white! The brace of
beggars have not even a bed, and must pass their wedding-night on the
straw: they have just been round to every cottage, begging a pint of
small beer, with which they mean to get royally drunk: a brave treat
for a wedding, your honour!"

Everybody around burst out a-laughing, and the unhappy despised pair
hung down their heads. Emilius pusht the coxcomb indignantly away, and
cried: "Here, take this!" tossing a hundred ducats, which he had
received that morning, into the hands of the amazed bridegroom.

The betrothed couple and their parents wept aloud, threw themselves
clumsily on their knees, and kist his hands and the skirts of his
coat.

He struggled to break loose from them. "Let that keep hunger out of
doors as long as you can make it last!" he exclaimed, quite stunned by
his feelings.

"Oh!" they all screamed, "oh your honour! we shall be rich and happy
till the day of our deaths, and longer too, if we live longer."

He did not know how he got away, but he found himself alone, and
hastened with tremulous steps into the wood. There he sought out the
thickest loneliest spot, and threw himself down on a grassy knoll, no
longer keeping in the bursting flood of his tears.

"I am sick of life!" he cried: "I cannot be gay and happy; I will not.
Make haste to receive me, dear kind mother earth, and shelter me with
thy cool refreshing arms from the wild beasts that trample on thee and
call themselves men. Oh God in heaven! how have I deserved that I
should lie upon down, and be clothed in silk, that the grape should
pour forth her precious heart's blood for me, and that all should
throng around me with offerings of homage and love! This poor wretch
is better and worthier than I; and misery is his nurse, and mockery
and venomous scorn alone wish him joy on his wedding. Every delicacy
that is placed before me, every draught out of my costly goblets, the
soft luxury of my bed, my wearing gold and rich garments, will seem to
me like so many sins, now that my eyes have seen how the world hunts
down many thousand thousand miserable beings, who are hungering after
the dry bread I throw away, and who never know what a good meal is. Oh
now I can fully enter into your feelings, ye holy saints, whom the
world scorns and scoffs at, ye who did scatter your all, even down to
your very raiment, among the poor, and did gird your