“That was the wrong way to go to work,” he acknowledged to himself. “The port was not at all the right thing; just the few sips of it have made my head so heavy I cannot hold it up, and my thoughts are all just confused, stupid quibbling with words. I can’t depend on them⁠—not only the first thought that comes into my head, but even the second one, the correction which my reason tries to make upon the first⁠—more’s the pity. ‘ Son crayon! ’ That means ‘her pencil,’ not ‘his pencil,’ in this case; you only say son because crayon is masculine. The rest is just a pretty feeble play on words. Imagine stopping to talk about that when there is a much more important fact; namely, that my left leg, which I am using as a support, reminds me of the wooden leg on Settembrini’s hand-organ, that he keeps jolting over the pavement with his knee, to get up close to the window and hold out his velvet hat for the girl up there to throw something into. And at the same time, I seem to be pulled, as though with hands, to lie down in the snow. The only thing to do is to move about. I must pay for the Kulmbacher, and limber up my wooden leg.”