They ascended to the highest story. While the Castellan was picking out the key from the bunch, the Professor eagerly examined the door, and remarked, "More beautiful mouldings by your old lock-smith."
"I have hopes," said the Princess.
"Everything looks that way," replied the learned man.
The heavy door creaked on its hinges, and a large room presented itself to the eyes of the searchers. A bright light shone through the narrow openings in the wall upon the mysterious apartment; atoms of dust were seen whirling about in the straight, shafts of air, while before and beyond all was confusion wrapt in semidarkness. Old furniture was piled up in hopeless confusion; gigantic wardrobes with broken doors, heavy tables with balls for feet, chairs with straight backs and leather cushions, from which the horsehair bristled out; together with fragments of old weapons, halberds, corroded greaves, and rusty helmets. Indistinct and vague, the forms appeared among each other: legs of chairs, flat pieces of wood with inlaid work, and heaps of old iron lying all around. It was a chaos of frippery, the artistic products of many centuries. Their hand touched the table at which a contemporary of Luther had sat; their foot pushed against a chest which had been broken open by Croats and Swede; or against the white lacquered chair, with moth-eaten velvet cushions, on which a court lady had once sat, in a hoop dress, with powdered hair. Now all lay together in desolate heaps, the cast-off husks of former generations, half destroyed and quite forgotten; empty chrysales, from which the butterflies had flown. All were covered with a grey shroud of dust--the last ashes of vanished life. What once had form and body, now, crushed into powder, whirled about in the air; clouds of dust opposed the entrance of those who came to disturb its possession; it hung to the hair and clothes of the living intruders, and glided slowly through the open door to the rooms, where varied colors and brilliant ornament surrounded the inmates, in order there to carry on the endless struggle of the past with the present--the quiet struggle that is daily renewed in great and small things which makes new things old, and finally dissolves the old in order that it may help to nourish the germ of youthful life.
The Professor glanced like a hawk amidst the legs of tables and chairs in the dusky background.
"Some things have lately been removed from here," he said; "there has been some sweeping among the furniture in the front."
"I yesterday endeavored to clean a little," said the Castellan, "because your Highness expressed a wish to enter here; but we have not gone far."
"Have you ever formerly examined the furniture in this room?" asked the Professor.
"No," replied the man. "I was only placed here last year by his Highness the Sovereign."
"Is there any catalogue of the things?" said the Professor.