Several days he wrote nothing; but wrapped himself in the slough of his parson's-cloak; and so in his canonicals, beside the Schoolmaster, put the few A-b-c shooters which were not, like forest-shooters, absent on furlough by reason of the spring, through their platoon firing in the Hornbook. He never did more than his duty, but also never less. It brought a soft, benignant warmth over his heart, to think that he, who had once ducked under a School-inspectorship, was now one himself.
About ten o'clock we meet from our different museums, and examine the village, especially the Biographical furniture and holy places, which I chance that morning to have had under my pen or pentagraph; because I look at them with more interest _after_ my description than _before_ it.
After the concluding grace, which is too long, we both of us set to entering the charitable subsidies and religious donations, which our parishioners have remitted to the sinking or rather rising fund of the church-box for the purchase of the new steeple-globe, into two ledgers; the one of these, with the names of the subscribers, or (in case they have subscribed for their children) with their children's names also, is to be inurned in a leaden capsule, and preserved in the steeple-ball; the other will remain below among the parish Registers. You cannot fancy what contributions the ambition of getting into the Ball brings us in; I declare, several peasants, who had given and well once already, contributed again when they had baptisms; must not little Hans be in the Ball too?
After this book-keeping by double entry, my gossip took to engraving on copper. He had been so happy as to elicit the discovery, that, from a certain stroke resembling an inverted Latin S, the capital letters of our German Chancery-hand, beautiful and intertwisted as you see them stand in Law-deeds and Letters-of-nobility, may every one of them be composed and spun out.
"Before you can count sixty," said he to me, "I take my fundamental-stroke and make you any letter out of it."
I merely inverted this fundamental-stroke, that is, gave him a German S, and counted sixty till he had it done. This line of beauty, when once it has been twisted and flourished into all the capitals, he purposes, by copperplates which he is himself engraving, to make more common for the use of Chanceries; and I may take upon me to give the Russian, the Prussian, and a few other smaller Courts, hopes of proof impressions from his hand; to under-secretaries they are indispensable.