solemn adjuration)—if but a drop of the heroic blood of the ancient Germans still flow in your veins—come! We will fix our abode in the Bohemian forests, draw together a band of robbers, and—What are you gaping at? Has your slender stock of courage oozed out already?     

       ROLLER. You are not the first rogue by many that has defied the gallows;—and yet what other choice have we?     

       SPIEGEL. Choice? You have no choice. Do you want to lie rotting in the debtor's jail and beat hemp till you are bailed by the last trumpet? Would you toil with pick-axe and spade for a morsel of dry bread? or earn a pitiful alms by singing doleful ditties under people's windows? Or will you be sworn at the drumhead—and then comes the question, whether anybody would trust your hang-dog visages—and so under the splenetic humor of some despotic sergeant serve your time of purgatory in advance? Would you like to run the gauntlet to the beat of the drum? or be doomed to drag after you, like a galley-slave, the whole iron store of Vulcan? Behold your choice. You have before you the complete catalogue of all that you may choose from!     

       ROLLER. Spiegelberg is not altogether wrong! I, too, have been concocting plans, but they come much to the same thing. How would it be, thought I, were we to club our wits together, and dish up a pocketbook, or an almanac, or something of that sort, and write reviews at a penny a line, as is now the fashion?     

       SCHUFT. The devil's in you! you are pretty nearly hitting on my own schemes. I have been thinking to myself how would it answer were I to turn Methodist, and hold weekly prayer-meetings?     

       GRIMM. Capital! and, if that fails, turn atheist! We might fall foul of       the four Gospels, get our book burned by the hangman, and then it would sell at a prodigious rate.     

       RAZ. Or we might take the field to cure a fashionable ailment. I know a quack doctor who has built himself a house with nothing but mercury, as the motto over his door implies.     

       SCHWEIT. (rises and holds out his hand to Spiegelberg). Spiegelberg, thou art a great man! or else a blind hog has by chance found an acorn.     

       SCHW. Excellent schemes! Honorable professions! How great minds       

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