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Professor Mach quotes somewhere an epigram of Lessing's: Sagt Hanschen Schlau zu Vetter Fritz, "Wie kommt es, Vetter Fritzen, Dass grad' die Reichsten in der Welt, Das meiste Geld besitzen?" Hanschen Schlau here treats the principle 'wealth' as something distinct from the facts denoted by the man's being rich.
Dörmaul decided to laugh. “Oho, my good fellow,” he said, and pushed his tile hat on to the back of his head, “you are getting all puffed up. Look out that you don’t burst. You remember the story of Hänschen: He was awfully proud of his porridge while sitting behind the stove; but when he went out on to the street, he fell into the puddle.” The little slave tittered.
Muhamed receives our thanks in the form of a lordly portion of carrots; and a pupil is introduced whose attainments do not tower so high above mine: Hanschen, the little pony, quick and lively as a big rat. Like me, he has never gone beyond elementary arithmetic: and so we shall understand each other better and meet on equal terms. Krall asks me for two numbers to multiply. I give him 63 X 7.
Another time, I wrote down from his dictation, 'Hanschen has bitten Kama. Like a child seeing its father after an absence, he felt the need to inform me of the little doings of the stable; he provided me with the artless chronicle of a humble and uneventful life." Krall, for that matter, living in the midst of his miracle, seems to think this quite natural and almost inevitable.
He does the sum and writes the product on the board, followed by the sign of division: 441 / 7. Instantly Hanschen, with a celerity difficult to follow, gives three blows, or rather three violent scrapes with his right hoof and six with his left, which makes 63, for we must not forget that in German they say not sixty-three, but three-and-sixty.
One morning, for instance, I came to the stable and was preparing to give him his lesson in arithmetic. He was no sooner in front of the spring-board than he began to stamp with his foot. I left him alone and was astounded to hear a whole sentence, an absolutely human sentence, come letter by letter from his hoof: 'Albert has beaten Hanschen, was what he said to me that day.
The pony's flippancy is as surprising as his skill. But in this unruly flippancy, in this hastiness which seems inattentive there is nevertheless a fixed and permanent idea. Hanschen paws the ground, kicks, prances, tosses his head, looks as if he cannot keep still, but never leaves his spring-board. Is he interested in the problems, does he enjoy them?
"I will come back to thee again, and see if I shall not one day become rich and great, see if thou wilt not have reason to be proud of thy Hanschen." His mother shook her head. She could then only feel that she was losing his daily care and presence, and that the future was all uncertain.
Hanschen seldom blunders; and, when he does, we receive a very clear impression that his mistake is voluntary: he is like a mischievous schoolboy playing a practical joke upon his master. The solutions fall thick as hail upon the little spring-board; the correct answer is released by the question as though you were pressing the button of an electric push.
There are four of them: Mohammed, the most intelligent, the most gifted of them all, the great mathematician of the party; his double, Zarif, a little less advanced, less tractable, craftier, but at the same time more fanciful, more spontaneous and capable of occasional disconcerting sallies; next, Hanschen, a little Shetland pony, hardly bigger than a Newfoundland dog, the street-urchin of the band, always quivering with excitement, roguish, flighty, uncertain and passionate, but ready in a moment to work you out the most difficult addition and multiplication sums with a furious scrape of the hoof; and lastly the latest arrival, the plump and placid Berto, an imposing black stallion, quite blind and lacking the sense of smell.
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