"Think you so, young jackanapes?" said Beresynth with a sneer of the deepest contempt. "With you, children, I have no business. Do you not know me?" cried he turning to Castalio: "perhaps you have nothing for me to do." "How should I?" said Castalio with a faltering voice: "I never saw you before. Leave me; I must decline your services. In this little house of mine I have no room for any stranger." Beresynth paced with his biggest strides up and down. "So, you don't know me? It may be; folks alter a good deal sometimes; for no man is always in his bloom. But, it strikes me, people ought not to forget me, or to mistake me for any one else, quite so soon as they might many of your smooth nicely painted ninnies.... And you too," as he turned round to the youths, "you perchance don't know that wisdommonger there." "O yes!" said Antonio: "he is our best friend, the excellent Castalio." Here the dwarf raised such an enormous shout of laughter, that the walls and windows of the room clattered and echoed it back. "Castalio! Castalio!" screamed he as if possest: "why not Aganippe too, or Hippocrene? So, you have got spectacles before your eyes, and your souls stare stupidly with a calf's look out of your round pumpkins of heads! Rub your noses, and see, and recognize, I pray you, your honoured Pietro of Abano, the great jack-of-all-trades from Padua!" He who called himself Castalio had sunk as if fainting into a chair: his trembling was so violent that all his limbs fluttered; the muscles of his face quivered with such force that no feature in it could be distinguisht; and after the young men had gazed on it for some time amazedly, they thought with horrour they perceived that from this distortion of all the lineaments came forth the well-known countenance of the aged Apone. With a loud scream the magician started from his seat, clencht his fists, and foamed at the mouth; he seemed in his fury of a gigantic size. "Well, yes!" he roared in a tone of thunder: "it is I, I, Pietro! and thou slave, thou art spoiling my game, as I was destroying those young brats after a new fashion. What wouldst thou, worm, of me, who am thy master, and who have cast thee off? Tremblest thou not through all thy bones at the thought of my vengeance and punishment?" Beresynth again raised the same pealing horrid laugh. "Vengeance! Punishment!" he repeated grinning. "Fool! matchless fool! art thou now for the first time to find out that such language toward me does not beseem thee? that thou juggler, must crawl in the dust before me? that a glance of my eye, a grasp of my iron arm, will dash thee to pieces, thou earth-born mummery with thy wretched tricks, which only prospered through my countenance."