"When at length I had the portrait-pencil and profile-scissors in my power, and one morning appeared with both before the Princess and the old Prince, I had to paint and cut the Prince himself; his daughter had already been married and secretly travelled off; for thy grandfather (unlike others who prophesy their movements beforehand), prophesies his only afterward, and opens his mouth merely to hear. "I soon cut out the man,--packed up,--went out into all the world. After nearly three years I stood again on the tenth terrace of Isola Bella, quite unexpectedly, before the Countess Cesara. Heaven and hell! what a woman was thy mother! She threw everybody into both of _those places_ at once; I know not whether she did thy father, too. The writer of this stood in his last ornithological transformation before her, as silent pearl-cock (guinea-peacock), (tears must be the pearls), and got a likeness of her after a few weeks. "She had two children, thee--I clearly remember thy then already sharpened contour--and thy sister, the so-called Severina. Thy father was not there, but his wax image was, by which I instantly recognized him eighteen years later in Rome. Thy sister, too, was repeated in wax; only thou not. A wax figure, like thee at a distance, which illusively prefigured thee as a man always held up before thee, the brother of thy father, who was there, too, as a file-leader of thy future, saying, 'Here thou art, cubed beforehand, and already forced up into full size, filled out from flask into cask,'--seeking thus to enkindle thee, so that thou mightest grow up and be a man. They had a uniform put on thee, like that which the wax man wore,--I know not of what sort. Then didst thou, striding around thine own micromegas, boldly call him out, out of the future into the present. Now thou knowest what thou hast become, and mayst well, and with more right, look down in thy turn as proudly upon the little one, as the little one formerly looked up to the great one. I could never approve in thy uncle this machine for spiritual ductility; besides, I have for all wax puppets such an abominating, shuddering dread. "My only object on the beautiful island was to get away from it, and from the fair islander, so soon as I had painted her. 'Stupid century,' said I, 'do I then want anything more of thee?' She sat to me gladly, as upon a throne. I, half in tempest, half in rainbow, sketched her, and naturally had to leave the picture uncopied. But, young man, some letters, which formed my name at that time, and which I wrote and concealed on the picture in the region of the heart under the water-colors, may serve thee as a Tetragrammaton, eleven Dominical letters and mothers of the reading (_matres lectionis_) of thy existence, in case I reach Spain safely, and in Valencia wash away on the likeness the coloring from my letters, and can now read in its heart, _Löwenskiold_. So was I then called in Danish.