The day at length arrived; the guards were posted in unusual strength; the pages of honor, and servants in their state-dresses, were drawn up in long and gorgeous files along the sides of the vast Gothic halls, which ran in continued succession from the front of the _schloss_ to the more modern saloons in the rear; bands of military music, collected from amongst the foreign prisoners of various nations at Vienna, were stationed in their national costume--Italian, Hungarian, Turkish, or Croatian--in the lofty galleries or corridors which ran round the halls; and the deep thunders of the kettle-drums, relieved by cymbals and wind-instruments, began to fill the mazes of the palace as early as seven o'clock in the evening; for at that hour, according to the custom then established in Germany, such entertainments commenced. Repeated volleys from long lines of musketeers, drawn up in the square, and at the other entrances of the palace, with the deep roar of artillery, announced the arrival of the more distinguished visitors; amongst whom it was rumored that several officers in supreme command from the Swedish camp, already collected in the neighborhood, were this night coming _incognito_--availing themselves of their masques to visit the Landgrave, and improve the terms of their alliance, whilst they declined the risk which they might have brought on themselves by too open a visit, in their own avowed characters and persons, to a town so unsettled in its state of feeling, and so friendly to the emperor, as Klosterheim had notoriously become.