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Thus did the nephew of the strange gentleman establish his respectability in the town in a very short time. The oldest inhabitants could not remember having ever seen a young man of this style in Gruenwiesel, and he created the greatest sensation that had ever been known there. It could not be said that the nephew had learned any thing more than the art of dancing; Latin and Greek were to him, as we were wont to express it, “Bohemian villages.” In a game at the mayor’s house he was called upon to write something, and it was discovered that he could not even write his own name. In geography, he made the most egregious blunders–as he would place a German city in France, or a Danish town in Poland; he had not read any thing, had not studied any thing, and the minister often shook his head seriously over the utter ignorance of the young man. Yet, in spite of all these defects, every thing he said or did was considered excellent; for he was so impudent as to claim that he was always right, and the close of every one of his speeches was, “I know better than you!”

Winter came, and now the young Englishman appeared in still greater glory. Every party was voted wearisome where he was not a guest. People yawned when a wise man began to speak; but when the young Englishman uttered the veriest nonsense in broken German, all was attention. It was now discovered that the young man was also a poet, for rarely did an evening go by that he did not pull out a piece of paper from his pocket and read some sonnets to the company. There were, to be sure, some people who maintained that some of these poems were poor and without sense, and that others they had read somewhere in print; but the nephew did not permit himself to be put down in any such manner. He read, and read, directed the attention of his hearers to the beauties of his verses, and was applauded to the echo.

His great triumph, however, was at the Gruenwiesel ball. No one could dance more gracefully and rapidly than he. None could execute such uncommonly difficult steps. His uncle dressed him in the greatest splendor, after the latest fashion; and although the clothes did not fit his body very well, yet every one thought him charmingly dressed. The men, to be sure, thought themselves somewhat insulted by the new fashion which he introduced. The mayor had always been accustomed to open the ball in his own person, while the leading young people had the right to arrange the other dances; but since the appearance of the young Englishman, all this was changed. Without much ceremony, he took the next best lady by the hand and led her out on the floor, arranged every thing to suit himself, and was lord and master and king of the ball. But because these innovations were acceptable to the ladies, the men did not venture to make any objections, and the nephew held firmly to his self-appointed office.

This ball seemed to furnish great entertainment for the old gentleman; he never once took his eyes off his nephew, wore a smiling face, and when all the world of Gruenwiesel moved up to him to sound the praises of the noble well-bred youth, he could no longer contain himself from very joy, but broke out into a hearty laugh, and conducted himself almost foolishly. The Gruenwiesel people attributed these singular manifestations of pleasure to his great love for his nephew, and did not think them unnatural. Still, every now and then he had to turn his fatherly attention to his nephew, for, in the middle of an elegant dance, the young man would leap up to the platform where the town musicians sat, take away the bass-viol from its owner, and scrape out a horrible medley; or for a change he would throw his heels up into the air and dance about on his hands. At such times, the old gentleman would take him aside, would talk to him very seriously, and tighten his neck-tie, until he once more was tractable.