Peace was therefore resolved on by a majority of two votes.
Several months have passed. The miners are at work again; the farmer is ploughing his fields; the lark sings high in air; the Altenet postage-stamps have been destroyed; and Marieke is the happy wife of Dr Olthausen.
No answer was ever received from the rest of the kings and emperors,—it is just possible that Marieke may have forgotten to post the letters entrusted to her care.
“LOOK here, waiter!” cried a gentleman in a restaurant, “here’s a hair in my soup!”
For all answer and excuse, the waiter removed his cap, showing a head as bare and smooth as a billiard ball.
“Yes, I see,” resumed the customer, “I see it was your last hair; that’s all right, it will never happen again!”
“So you’ve written a play, M. Vermorcken?”
“Yes—no—yes; that is to say, not the play itself, yet—but my speech, that I am to make, when I thank them for calling me out on the stage.”
It is quiet now on deck. The singing forward has ceased, the watch is set, and the larboard watch, who are to come on at midnight, are below—including the tall corporal of marines, whom we heard just now singing bass. But the little monkey of a boy, who took the tenor part in “O Julia!” belongs to the starboard watch, and now has another occupation on hand.
Seated on a tub turned upside down, close to the foremast, he is reading aloud, by the light of a lantern, out of an “awfully fine” book.
The boy (his name is Jozef) can read “real first-rate”; and from each of the listeners seated round him he is to receive the sum of two cents.
The book which he now has before him, and which is covered with oil-stains, because he has to hold it so close to the lantern,—the book which is so “awfully fine,” is entitled “Count Matatskai; or, The Bandit with the Grey Beard: A Story from the Mountains.”
Count Matatskai is a youthful nobleman who has fallen in love with a mountain maiden, the beautiful but fierce Krimhelia, daughter of a chamois-hunter. After various meetings on the rocks by moonlight, with a faithful old servitor _incognito_ in the background, Krimhelia makes up her mind to accept the Count’s love, and fly with him to a distant country, where counts and the daughters of chamois-hunters stand precisely on the same social footing. But now a difficulty occurs, and it is this: Krimhelia has sworn an oath to avenge the death of her father, who has been killed in a fight with the band commanded by the Grey-Bearded Brigand.