I should be glad if, before I and the reader leave his house, we might take with us a medallion, an adumbration of this Hoppedizel, as a souvenir; but I shrink from the labor--I would rather emboss all the characters of this work on paper or wax than this man. His character consists of a compilation of a hundred characters, his knowledge of all departments of knowledge, his acuteness of skepticism, his vice of stoicism, his virtue of a system upon virtue, and his actions of jokes and tricks; and grimaces.
For all that, or _for_ all that, the Captain liked him, because he saw him often (he was grum to almost everyone who did not visit him) and because both were merry blades, and because people love each other in a hundred instances without a devil's knowing why. Falkenberg would have exchanged shots with Behemoth himself, for any friend, even for the one who had been the first to _take him in_--he would have done it out of honor and good-heartedness; the Professor, on the contrary, preferred pure morals, as one might pure mathematics, to applied morality, and seldom acted. One loves to remember, therefore, the proof of his fine consistency to his principles which he once gave as a guest in Auenthal, when at midnight, instead of the Captain, only his riderless nag came home out of the heavy snowdrifts. Another, _e. g_., the Captain himself, would have mounted the same nag and ridden out to seek and save the lost; but the Professor neatly snuffed the tallow candle and seated himself by the wife, who continued to weep disconsolately, and who at a former time used to worry herself almost to death if her husband was a little late at night, although she scolded herself soundly for it the very next morning--and said to her composedly: "She might just cry as much as she liked, he would gladly allow it; it did little harm, rather it lightened the heart, and withal washed the pupil of the eye and refracted a too intense light; besides the superfluous tears must needs filter through the nasal cavity into the throat and stomach and help digestion; but as to her husband, the worst that could have befallen him would be that he had frozen to death; but he knew, partly from experience, that there was no gentler way of dying than by cold--for, in fact, it was the same as if one were hanged or drowned, for one died by an apoplectic stroke."