The pleasant scene was Neuchatel; the pleasant month was April; the pleasant place was a notary¹’s office; the pleasant person in it was the notary: a rosy², hearty³, handsome old man, chief notary of Neuchatel, known far and wide in the canton as Ma?tre Voigt.  Professionally and personally, the notary was a popular citizen.  His innumerable kindnesses and his innumerable oddities had for years made him one of the recognised public characters of the pleasant Swiss town.  His long brown frock-coat and his black skull-cap, were among the institutions of the place: and he carried a snuff-box which, in point of size, was popularly believed to be without a parallel in Europe.

There was another person in the notary’s office, not so pleasant as the notary.  This was Obenreizer.

An oddly pastoral kind of office it was, and one that would never have answered in England.  It stood in a neat back yard, fenced off from a pretty flower-garden.  Goats browsed⁴ in the doorway⁵, and a cow was within half-a-dozen feet of keeping company with the clerk.  Ma?tre Voigt’s room was a bright and varnished⁶ little room, with panelled walls, like a toy-chamber⁷.  According to the seasons of the year, roses, sunflowers, hollyhocks, peeped in at the windows.  Ma?tre Voigt’s bees hummed through the office all the summer, in at this window and out at that, taking it frequently in their day’s work, as if honey were to be made from Ma?tre Voigt’s sweet disposition⁸.  A large musical box on the chimney-piece often trilled away at the Overture⁹ to Fra Diavolo, or a Selection from William Tell, with a chirruping liveliness that had to be stopped by force on the entrance of a client, and irrepressibly broke out again the moment his back was turned.

分享到：