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The stock was half-rotten and worm-eaten; the lock was as rusty and about as well adapted to its ostensible purpose as an old door-hinge; the threading of the screws about the trigger was completely worn away; while the barrel shook in the wood. Such was the weapon the chief desired me to restore to its original condition.
After reasoning sternly with an intruding sparrow, thus did the dauntless General Door-Hinge address them: "Men, there's a nawful big army against us, but le's die like men, my men. Forwards!"
The stock was half rotten and worm-eaten; the lock was as rusty and about as well adapted to its ostensible purpose as an old door-hinge; the threading of the screws about the trigger was completely worn away; while the barrel shook in the wood. Such was the weapon the chief desired me to restore to its original condition.
The references to Sterne in Goethe’s works, in his letters and conversations, are fairly numerous in the aggregate, but not especially striking relatively. In the conversations with Eckermann there are several other allusions besides those already mentioned. Goethe calls Eckermann a second Shandy for suffering illness without calling a physician, even as Walter Shandy failed to attend to the squeaking door-hinge. Eckermann himself draws on Sterne for illustrations in Yorick’s description of Paris, and on January 24, 1830, at a time when we know that Goethe was re-reading Sterne, Eckermann refers to Yorick’s (?) doctrine of the reasonable use of grief. That Goethe near the end of his life turned again to Sterne’s masterpiece is proved by a letter to Zelter, October 5, 1830; he adds here too that his admiration has increased with the years, speaking particularly of Sterne’s gay arraignment of pedantry and philistinism. But a few days before this, October 1, 1830, in a conversation reported by Riemer, he expresses the same opinion and adds that Sterne was the first to raise himself and us from pedantry and philistinism. By these remarks Goethe commits himself in at least one respect to a favorable view of Sterne’s influence on German letters. A
They were the Nail People, the most reckless band of mercenaries the world has ever known, led by old General Door-Hinge, who was somewhat inclined to collapse in the middle, but possessed of the unusual virtue of eyes in both ends of him.
I hitched old Greylegs to one of the iron bolts, which had once held a door-hinge, and ran to her to make sure that she was unhurt. "How in the world did you get here?" I asked. "Are you sure you're not hurt?" She laughed a little at this, and I got out my stores, and we made our supper by the fire. "Where's old Nigger?" I asked her; for I was puzzled by seeing no horse.
Every piece of comparatively small iron-work used in the construction of railway engines, carriages, vans, and trucks, from a door-hinge to a coupling-chain, was forged in that smithy.
And Captain Blokes said that he knew nothing half so good for a Gunshot Wound as cold Rum-and-Water; and between the two I had like to have died, but all were very kind to me, even to extracting the Ball with a Pair of Snuffers; and a great clumsy thing the said missile was, being, I verily believe, part of a Door-hinge which these clumsy Spanish Brutes had broken off short to cram into their Guns; and yet it might have gone worse with me had it been a smooth round cast Bullet, and drilled a clean Wound right through my Body.
The author had never heard of this creature until it introduced itself by means of the unpleasant croaking sound which it sends forth, very similar to that produced by the action of a rusty door-hinge.
So the Earl's gentle exit ends in a musical and penetrating arpeggio of a door-hinge, equal to the betrayal of Masonic secrecy if delivered at the right moment. "Is Mrs. Bailey gone?" says the patient, ascribing the wrong cause to it. "His lordship has gone, Mr. Torrens. He thought you were dropping off." "Stop him stop him! Say I have something particular to say. Do stop him!"
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