More and more fingers continually drew the letters "_v. C._" in his hand, and he nodded composedly. The time surrounded him with manifold dramas, and everywhere he stood between theatre-curtains. As with uneasy head and heart he stepped to the window, to see whether he should soon have moonshine for his night-walk, he saw a heavy hearse, flanked by torches, move along across the market, which was conveying a manor-lord to his family-vault; and the undisturbed night-watchman called out, behind the creeping dead man, the beginning of the spirit-hour and of a birth-hour, which is precious to us. Could his smitten heart refrain from saying to him how sharply Death, the hard, solid, insoluble, with its glacier-air, sweeps through the warm scenes of life, and leaves behind it all over which it breathes stiff and snow-white? Could he help thinking of the cold young sister, whose voice now awaited him in Tartarus? And as Schoppe, with his puppet-parody, came to him, and he pointed out to him the street, and the latter said: "Bon! Friend Death sits on his game-wagon, and glances quietly up, as if the friend would say, 'Bon! only dance on; I make my return trip, and carry you too to your place and spot,'"--how close must it have been to him under his sultry visor! At this second the pale mask came, with others, to the window; he opened his glowing face for coolness; a hasty draught of wine, and still more his fancy, showed him the world in burning surfaces; the mask surveyed him closely, with a dark, uncertain glow of the eye, which he at last could no longer bear, because it might as well have been kindled by hatred as by love, just as the spots on the sun seem now like abysses and now like mountains. Eleven o'clock had gone by; he suddenly disappeared from the hot looks and the crushing throng, and betook himself on his way to the heart without a breast. 51. CYCLE. While he stood at the gate awaiting his sword, a group of new masks (mostly representatives of lifelessness, e. g. a boot, peruke-stand, &c.) came running into the city, and peered with astonishment at the tall, white, knightly stranger. He took his sword with him, but no servant. Whatever the danger into which the visit of a secluded, gloomy catacomb-avenue, and the foreknowledge of this visit on the part of others, might plunge him, his character left him no other choice than the one which he had made; no, he would sooner have let himself be murdered than shamed before his father.