"The aforesaid Baldhead, or head of Anubis, stood, then, (Heaven and the Devil best know why, but I believe the fact,) as Father of Death on Isola Bella; he lay as travelling journeyman on the Prince's grave and in every sort of ambush, to give thee thy sister for wife—in case I suffered it; but so soon as ever I have sealed this, I sally forth to Spain, break into Linda's picture cabinet, look after a certain likeness of her mother, the place and chamber whereof I have taken pains clearly to ascertain; and if it is the picture by me, then all is right and the thunder may strike into the midst of the whole business.
"The Baldhead himself is a fifth quarter of a proof,—he is one of the few men who, when hardly of a spider's thickness, wickedly made water in their mothers' womb.
"Perhaps I may find thy uncle, who knew me again here, he said, and who has actually gone off to Valencia.[[119]]
"O Heavens! if I should succeed (but why not, since my tongue remains of iron and this leaf comes, in iron, under charge of the honest Wehrfritz, whose heart is an old German, and does not Germany rightly represent the heart in the virgin Europa?)—if, I write, I should succeed in kindling a fire upon a cursed mystery of a straw-door, tearing all up and down and away, blind gates and sacrificial gates, and a strong light should fall in upon the brave Linda and the brave youth, illuminating the neighboring Baldhead (perhaps somebody else), who even in the darkness will fain make a slanting thrust with two grafting and slaughtering knives down into a brother and sister——
"If I should once succeed in this, that is to say, in the harvest month,—for then I should come back again to Pestitz and have the likeness in my pocket,—and I should have boldly avenged myself and two innocent beings upon guilty ones: then would I hold myself fully at liberty to seize hold of my head and say, 'À bas, gare, heads off!' To which, certainly, (since, indeed, the question is not of any stupid packing off of the body by a Werther-powder, but only of the purpose to lose, upon occasion, what competent judges call my understanding,) my friends must agree, because they would still have me (since in this case the body is still retained), although as the night-piece of a man, because I would then carry on a rational discourse upon any subject (only let no one attack the fixed idea!) as well as another man, and certainly should not forget to sprinkle over it, now and then, a good moral joke (verily the true spice), and because the state should find me day and night equipped and saddled to save it, after the example of the Berlin Bedlamites, who once, upon a fire breaking out in the house, extinguished it and saved the house in the best style, and I would come in at the gap and the breach, when the dark intervals of its other civil servants could not otherwise be filled up than with our lucid ones.
"Farewell! I break off. The world smiles upon me gayly. In Spain I shall find a bit of youth again—as in this writing.
"Schoppe.
"Apropos! Has the Baldhead nowhere run against thee? I cannot tell thee how I labor now daily to impress upon myself and appropriate beforehand a real horror and dread at the wish of running him down hereafter in my madness, in order that afterward the possible act may not, as a late fruit of my previous rational, moral state, be reckoned over against me into the other.
"Annihilate this letter!"
When Albano raised his fiery eyes from the letter, he stood before Lilar under a high triumphal arch, and the sun went down in splendor behind Elysium. "Dost thou not know me?" asked Linda, in a low tone, who stood beside him in travelling dress, weeping in bright love and bliss; and Julienne came flying out and making a sign of caution to both, from the entrance thicket of the flute-dell, and cried, as a cunning pretext: "Linda, Linda, hearest thou not the flutes, then?" And Albano had forgotten the painful letter.