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the wine-cellar, and the tavern he was indispensable. No
one else could discourse so scientifically on bowling and
dog-training or talk with such unction of feints and
parrying. No one knew wine as he did. He had worked out
profound theories about dicing and love-making, and could
speak learnedly and at length on the folly of crossing the
domestic stud with the Salzburger horses. To crown all,
he knew anecdotes about everybody, and—most impressive
of all to the young men—he had decided opinions
about everything.
Moreover, he was always ready to humor and serve
them, never forgot the line that divided him from the
nobility, and was decidedly funny when, in a fit of drunken
frolic, they would dress him up in some whimsical guise.
He let himself be kicked about and bullied without
resenting it, and would often good-naturedly throw himself into
the breach to stop a conversation that threatened the peace
of the company.
Thus he gained admittance to circles that were to him
as the very breath of life. To him, the citizen and cripple,
the nobles seemed like demigods. Their cant alone was
human speech. Their existence swam in a shimmer of light
and a sea of fragrance, while common folk dragged out
their lives in drab-colored twilight and stuffy air. He cursed
his citizen birth as a far greater calamity than his
lameness, and grieved over it, in solitude, with a bitterness and
passion that bordered on insanity.
“How now, Daniel,” said Ulrik Frederik, when the little
man reached him. “’T was surely no light mist that clouded
your eyes last night, since you’ve run aground here on
the rampart, or was the clary at flood tide, since I find you
high and dry like Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat?”
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