By this time--as the footmen, the butchers, Falterle, &c., were only the snow-drops of this masquerade-spring--better flowers--violets, forget-me-nots, and primroses--had sprung up or come in. For one such forget-me-not I see a churl entering, puffed out behind and before, and convex like a burning-glass, who now opened the back-door and shook out confects from his hump-back, and then the front-door and produced sausages. Hafenreffer, however, writes me the invention has once before appeared at a masquerade in Vienna. Then came a company of German play-cards, which shuffled and played out and took each other; a fine emblem of atheism, which exhibits it wholly free from the absurdity wherewith men have so loved to disfigure it! Mr. Von Augusti appeared also, but in simple dress and domino; he became (incomprehensibly to the Count) very soon the polar-star of the dancers, and the controlling Cartesian vortex of the dancing-school. With what miserable, black ammunition-biscuit and beggar's-bread of enjoyment these people get along! thought Albano, to whom, all day long, his dreams, those Jupiter's-doves, had been bringing ambrosia. And how pale and stale is their fire, their fancy, and their speech, he thought too. Verily, a life down in a gloomy glacier-chasm! for he imagined everybody must speak and feel as intensely and ardently as he. Now came a limping man, with a great glass-chest on his belly; of course it was easy to recognize the Librarian; he had on--either because he sent too late, or would not pay, for a domino--something black, which he had borrowed of a mourning-cloak lender, and was covered from shoulder-blade to shin-bone with awful masks, which he, with many finger-signs, offered mostly to those people who played their parts behind the opposite kind, e. g. short-nosed ones to long noses. He was waiting for the beginning of a hop Anglaise, the notes for which stood just on the hand-organ of his chest; then he, too, began; he had therein an excellent puppet-masquerade which had been planed out by Bestelmaier, and now he set the little masks to hopping parallel with the great ones. His object was a comparative anatomy of the two masquerades, and the parallelism was melancholy. Besides, he had rigged it all out with by-work: little dumb persons swung their little bells in the chest; a tolerably grown-up child rocked the cradle of an inanimate doll, with which the little fool still played; a mechanic was working away at his speaking machine, by which he was going to show the world how far mere mechanism could go toward giving life to puppets; a live, white mouse[114] sprang out by a little chain, and would have upset many of the club, if he could have broken it; a starling, buried-alive, a true first Greek comedy and school for scandal in miniature, was practising upon the dancing-company the death-blow of the tongue with perfect freedom and without distinction; a looking-glass-wall mimicked the