I know not whether my readers are acquainted with the Little Tailor of Sachsenhausen? Here it is.
_History of the Little Tailor of Sachsenhausen._
It happened that a pious little tailor, at Sachsenhausen, was coming out of church one Sunday with his wife, in all his best attire. The air was raw, the little tailor had taken nothing over night but a soft boiled egg and a few pickled gerkins, and in the morning a cup of coffee. Moreover he had been singing most vehemently in the church, and hence he began to feel in a piteous plight, and to long for a dram. As he had worked hard through the week, and had been particularly kind to his better-half, making her a very pretty gown out of the pieces cabbaged from his customers, she consented to his going into the apothecary's and getting himself a dram, which he did accordingly. The awkward apprentice, who was alone in the shop, made a mistake, and took down a bottle which, instead of a dram, contained inflammable gas, wherewith balloons are filled. Of this the apprentice poured out a full glass, and the tailor, putting it at once to his mouth, swallowed off the gas as an agreeable reviver. It made him, however, feel very strangely,--as if he had got a pair of wings on his shoulders, or as if some one were playing at foot-ball with him; for he felt himself compelled to jump up and down in the shop, and with every moment the impetus increased.
"Eh! Gemini! Gemini!" he cried,--"what a nimble dancer I have grown!"
The apothecary's apprentice stood with his mouth gaping wide from pure wonder, when it chanced that some one opened the door so hastily, that the opposite window flew open also. A strong current of air poured in, caught up the little tailor, and away he sailed through the window, since when he has not been seen; but it happened some time after, that the people of Sachsenhausen observed in the air a fire-ball, which lighted the whole country with its brightness, and then, being extinguished, fell to earth. All were eager to know what had dropt, and ran to the place, but found nothing more than a little heap of ashes, but with this the tongue of a shoe-buckle, a little piece of yellow satin with flowers, and a something black, which, to look at, was like the horn-top of a walking stick. All were in deep council how such things could fall down from heaven in a fire-ball, when the wife of the departed tailor came up, and, on seeing these things, wrung her hands, took on most piteously, and cried out, "Ah, woe! that is my husband's buckle!--Ah, woe! that is my husband's Sunday waistcoat!--Ah, woe! that is my husband's cane-top!"--A very learned man, however, has declared that the cane-top was no cane-top, but a meteoric ball, or an abortive globe.