'But the thing that best would win itIs the Lady Fair within it.'
'But the thing that best would win it
Is the Lady Fair within it.'
Remembering these words of the joyous Bacchus as being particularly applied to Bremen and to my own case, I hurried, after I had slept a few hours, to bid good morning to the lovely Adelgunde. But she received me with more than wonted coldness, and when I whispered some affectionate words to her she fairly laughed aloud, and turning her back said, 'Go, and have your sleep well out, sir, first.' A friend, who was sitting at the piano in another corner of the room, followed me as I turned away, and taking my hand said, 'Dear Brother, it is all over with your love for her--put all thoughts of it out of your head.' 'I could see as much,' I answered; and then,sotto voce, 'The Devil take every pretty pair of eyes and every rosy mouth in the world!' 'But tell me,' says my friend, 'is it true that you stayed the whole night drinking in the wine cellar?' 'Well, yes! but whose business is that?' 'Heaven knows how she heard it, for she has been crying all the morning, and vows you are a mere vulgar sot, and she will have no more to do with you.' 'Well,' said I, steeling myself, 'good then; that proves she can never have loved me. Give her my kind regards; farewell.'
I ran home quickly and resolved to quit Bremen at once. As I left the market-place that evening I gave old Roland's statue a friendly wave of the hand, and to the horror of my postillion, he nodded a parting greeting at me with his stone head. I threw a kiss to the old Council Hall and its happy cellars, and curling up in the comer of my chaise allowed the fancies of the night to pass once more before my eyes.
Footnote 1: Schalttag, lit. 'intercalary day'--used of the 29th of February in leap years--impossible to translate except by a circumbendibus. Hence we have borrowed from ecclesiastical phraseology a word which, to a certain extent, possesses the same meaning in English. So far as we are aware Hauff is peculiar in using Schalttag in this sense.