My pen now runs on, in the _earth-shadow_ of the orb, thus: Wutz keeps not in his house three respectable chairs, no window curtains or tapestry-hangings. Meanwhile very much too showy furniture lies in Scheerau; I enjoy here the most miserable, and say to myself, a Prince can hardly show a worse in an artificial hermitage. Even our almanac we, I and my landlord, write out for ourselves with our own hands, like fellows of the Berlin Academy--only with chalk on the keeping room door; every week we publish a _Heft_ or weekly part of our almanac and wipe out the past. On the four-square stove three couples might dance, whom, like the modern tragedies, notwithstanding all deformity of arrangement and breadth, it would poorly warm through. It must, by the way, come at last to hand and pocket stoves when the times arrive that we shall have to fetch out of the mines instead of the metals the wood wherewith we now feed them....
A ram was terribly pounded, that is, his red shank--the tin platters, the baptismal presents of the little Wutzes, are dusted out--my silver knife and fork are borrowed for the occasion--the fire crackles--the Frau Wutz runs--her children and birds scream.--All these preparations for a far too great _diner_, which is to-day to be given down below, I hear up in my study-chamber. Such preparations are perhaps more suitable to the rank of the two guests who are to receive the entertainment, than to the station of the two school-men who give it. To the present historian and his sister, namely, they are permitted to give a dinner and to sit themselves with the company at the table. The schoolmaster had been allowed to install much of his cleaned-out furniture for the space of a week in my sitting-room, because his own was at last, after long petitioning--for the consistory does not look with favor on repairs in the visible any more than in the invisible church--being reformed, _i. e_., repaired, namely whitewashed.--Therefore he invited me (in court style) to dine, and I (in similar court style) accepted the invitation.
I shall not write out the rest of the section till evening, partly in order not to _think away_ my appetite for dinner, partly by way of hobbling after a little addition to it in the open air, where, besides, I can hear two or three yellow-hammers and the church-people sing. On the whole the after-summer, which, to-day, with its finest sky-blue dress and the sun upon it as order-badge, stands out there upon the fields, is a still Good Friday of Nature; and if we human beings were polite people, we should go out oftener into the open air and politely escort the departing summer to the very door. I foresee I should never be able to look my fill at the mild sun, which has become a moon stealing softly around us, and which in the after-summer deserves the feminine article [_die Sonne_], if I were not obliged to fix my eye upon the heights of Scheerau, where my good souls live and whence my Doctor is coming to-day to visit me....