"And the poor-house which our revered Queen, Maria Theresa, endowed, is it not still empty? What are we about that we do not find inmates for it? But you find none."
"The devil we do! Don't the blind and the lame stand each Sunday before the church door, but if we want to befriend them, we've only to say: 'Come you, poor wretches, we'll show you the way into the poor-house,' and off they run in a fright, so great a horror have they of the bread of the State."
"You children of the devil! And what of the poor Izbeghers whose forty houses were burned down? The Emperor allowed them as much from the treasury as the worth of the houses amounted to, but you raised the rents of the remaining houses and then dunned them for the money."
"That's natural enough, seeing the Emperor let the State annex the burned part in order to pay so much the less to the ground-landlord. If Peter has nothing, then pay Paul, that is the rule."
"A godless rule too! Amend your ways, I say, for if next year as many complaints reach my ear as have this, I'll denounce your coffer to the Treasury."
"Your reverence is not such a bad sort," ventured the judge in a conciliatory tone.
Thereupon, the keys were withdrawn, the night-caps again donned, and the notary led his blind men again to the ground-floor of the council chamber, where they congratulated one another on the risks run.
"Only yon priest should not have it all his own way with his maledictions," grumbled the judge. "But they are all like that. Each one of them thinks that hardly earned money should be wasted on churches and hospitals."
"I also think, my lord, that it would be better that such an unreasonably big sum of money should be divided to each one as he has need," suggested a juryman bolder than the rest.
The speaker might, from the assenting murmur which greeted his speech, take it for granted that he had a good many on his side, but the eloquence of the notary soon crushed such sympathy.
"Ay, my dear friend, that would kill the goose which lays the golden eggs. This coffer is our pledge of power, our shield of protection, our bond of union. As long as it exists are we rulers in this city and in all its dependencies. As long as this coffer answers for us, so long can we get the laws made in our favour. As long as we have our money, they won't take our sons for military service, or ask us for accounts, and if a meadow or a plot of land is to be divided, we look after the allotment. It is we who direct public works. It is we who fell the timber in the forest, who cast the net into the Danube, and limit the vintage; we buy and sell; and fix the tithes. As long as the key of that coffer is in our hands, we must needs be great powers in the city, like Kaiser Joseph in his palace at Vienna. At the end of that key we whistle a tune to which all men must dance."