This one comfort the Librarian held to, that Alban on his birthday was directed to pay a visit to the heart without a breast, which visit he could just forego, and so make the seer out to be a myops and a liar. "Would to Heaven," said he, "an Ezekiel would just prophesy to me that I should bring him to the gallows! I would not do it for any money, but I would, without mercy, make it fatal, not to his neck, but to his credit and his brains." To his incredulous father, also, Albano wrote, during the journey, not without a blush, the incredible history; for he had too few years over his head, and too much energy and daring, to love reserve in himself or others. Only weak, caterpillar- and hedgehog-like souls curl and crumple up into themselves at every touch: under the free brain beats gladly a free heart. At last, when sunny mountains and shady forests enough, like days and nights that have been lived through, had been left behind them, they approached the goal of their long riding-ground, full of countries, and now the Principality of _Hohenfliess_ lay only one principality distant from them. This second principality, which was next-door neighbor to the first, and which by breaking through the walls might easily have been merged with it into one common political structure, was called, as is known to geographical readers, _Haarhaar_. The Lector told the Librarian, as they approached the armorial and boundary stones, that the two courts looked upon each other almost as deadly foes; not so much because they were _diplomatic_ relatives--although it is true that, among princes, uncle, cousin, brother, signify no more than brother-in-law applied to postilions, or father and mother to the old folks among the Brandenburghers--as because they were really relatives, and each other's heirs. It would cost me too much room, if I were disposed to set before the reader the family-trees of the two courts,--which were their Upas-trees and Dragon-trees,--with all their heraldic leaves, water-shoots, and lichens; the result must content him, namely, that Hohenfliess, land and people, would fall to the principality of Haarhaar, in case the hereditary prince, Luigi, the last hollow shoot and sapling of the male stock of Hohenfliess, were to wither away. What hordes of Venetian Lion-heads Haarhaar pours into the land of future inheritance, who are to devour nothing there but learned advertisements and placards, and what knavish bands of political mechanics it colonizes there, as in a sort of Botany Bay, cannot be told for want of time. And yet Haarhaar again, on the other hand, is so generous as to desire nothing more heartily than to see the financial estate of Hohenfliess--its business, agriculture, silk manufactures, and breed of horses--in the highest bloom, and to hate and curse in the highest degree all public extravagance, that enervation of the great intercostal-nerve (money), as the mightiest canonical impediment to population.