But I am putting it quite too strongly; no reader will be willing to stir a step after the Captain towards Lower-Scheerau. Their greatest fault is, that they are good for nothing; but, aside from that, they are thrifty, full of none but trades-people, temperate, and sweep the streets and their faces nice and clean. Capitals, like courts, have a family-likeness; but country-towns inasmuch as more commercial, military, legal, mining or marine sap flows through them--a different full-face and half-face.
The Falkenberg ship's company alighted from its traveling ark before the plated front door of the Professor of Ethics, Hoppedizel; in the Professor's second story they usually had their winter quarters. Just behind the said door the Captain encountered an absurd melodrama, namely: the Raft Inspector, _Peuschel_, was leaning against the wall, vomiting and cursing; and regularly alternating from one to the other, as between Pentameter and Hexameter. The Professor of Morals quickly, with an uninked finger, wrote on the wall the outlines of the following words which he read off as fast as he traced them: "It was indeed disgusting, devilishly disgusting." Any other man the entrance of an old friend like Falkenberg would at once have disconcerted in the whole scene; the Professor, however, was not to be cheated out of his joke, but began his embrace in an unaltered tone with a report of the present case: "The gentleman before you. Raft Inspector Peuschel," (began Hoppedizel) "is fond of tippling, with wine particularly--it was in vain that the inspectoress, his lady"--(for discreet forbearance was never on Hoppedizel's lips)--"had sought to reform him by letting a live frog die in his wine. He himself" (he added) "had therefore to-day tried his hand at making this guzzling sicken him. For he had luckily cut a gall-stone--as thick as a Muscatelle-pear--out of a University subject; _this_ he had hollowed out into a drinking urn and made Herr Peuschel believe it was of lava and to-day had let his vomiting friend drink out of it genuine Hungarian wine of the best crop; and that it might not fail to nauseate him and set his _crop_ into a reaction, he had only a few minutes before made it clear to his patient that the volcanic beaker was veritable gravel-stone. And he hoped it would be some time before his friend would get this piece of earthenware out of his head."