67. Individual Minds, nay, Political Bodies, are like organic bodies; extract the interior air from them, the atmosphere crushes them together; pump off under the bell the exterior resisting air, the interior inflates and bursts them. Therefore let every State keep up its internal and its external resistance both at once.
In the pleasure-house itself we found sufficient pleasure; encircled as we were, with blooming faces and meadows. In my secret heart, I all along kept looking down, with success, on Schabacker's refusal; and till midnight made myself a happy day of it. I had deserved it, Berga still more. Nevertheless, about one in the morning, I was destined to find a windmill to tilt with; a windmill, which truly lays about it with somewhat longer, stronger, and more numerous arms than a giant, for which Don Quixote might readily enough have taken it. On the market place, for reasons more easily fancied than specified in words, I let Berga go along some twenty paces before me; and I myself, for these foresaid reasons, retire without malice behind a covered booth, the tent most probably of some rude trader; and lingered there a moment according to circumstances. Lo! steering hither with dart and spear, comes the Booth-watcher, and coins and stamps me on the spot, into a filcher and housebreaker of his Booth-street; though the simpleton sees nothing but that I am standing in the corner, and doing anything but--taking. A sense of honor without callosity is never blunted for such attacks. But how in the dead of night was a man of this kind, who had nothing in his head--at the utmost beer, instead of brains--to be enlightened on the truth of the matter?
I shall not conceal my perilous resource; I seized the fox by the tail, as we say; in other words, I made as if I had been muddled, and knew not rightly, in my liquor, what I was about. I therefore mimicked everything I was master of in this department; staggered hither and thither; splayed out my feet like a dancing-master; got into zigzag in spite of all efforts at the straight line; nay, I knocked my good head (perhaps one of the clearest and emptiest of the night) like a full one, against real posts.
However, the Booth-bailiff, who probably had been oftener drunk than I, and knew the symptoms better, or even felt them in himself at this moment, looked upon the whole exhibition as mere craft, and shouted dreadfully: "Stop, rascal; thou art no more drunk than I! I know thee of old. Stand, I say, till I speak to thee! Wouldst have thy long finger in the market, too? Stand, dog, or I'll make thee!"