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Various were the ways by which old Schatten had insinuated himself into the good graces of the people of Beauvais. To please them he would, when in the humour, act twenty different parts—now he would be a learned doctor, and now a mountebank; at times he would utter the wisdom of sages—at times play a hundred antic tricks, making his audience shout with merriment. For one long winter did Schatten profoundly lecture upon laurels, crowns, swords, and money-bags; and, like a skilful chemist, would he analyse their component parts.

“This,” cried Schatten, producing a semblance of the wreath, “this is the laurel crown of one of the Cæsars. How fresh and green the leaves remain! Ha! there is no such preservative as innocent blood—it embalms the names of mighty potentates, who else had never been heard of: steeped in it, deformity becomes loveliness—fame colours her most lasting pictures with its paint! The fields that grew this branch were richly manured: tens of thousands of hearts lay rotting there; the light of thousands of eyes was quenched; palaces and hovels, in undistinguished heaps, were strewn about the soil; there lay the hoary and the unborn; the murdered wife and the outraged virgin—and showers of tears falling on this garden of agony and horror, it was miraculously fertile—for lo! it gave forth this one branch, to deck the forehead of one man! In the veins that seam its leaves are the heart strings of murdered nations; it is the plant of fire and blood, reaped by the sword!—Such is the conqueror’s laurel.