"Then is the Countess Linda de Romeiro, without mercy, thy sister Severina. God grant only that thou mayst not haply have seen and married her before the receipt of this letter. She must, according to what I heard yesterday, have set out for Italy. "For when I saw the Countess Linda here for the first time, it was to me, in the market square of Pestitz, as if I were standing up on the terrace of Isola Bella, and beholding the Alps, thy mother, my youth, hardly three paces distant from me! By Heaven, just as if in the pier-mirror of time the white rosy image of thy buried mother had been snatched at once out of the depths of distance, and brought close to the glass, and now hung before it in blooming redness, so stood Linda before me! For the divine resemblance of the two is so great! No Arian _Homoiousion_[118a] whatever, but a complete Orthodox _Homoousion_[118b] is to be believed here. Thus would I write to thee, hadst thou the necessary church-history at hand for the understanding of such an allusion. "I painted Linda, too, this winter. What she related to me of the character of her mother was entirely the same, as I had been able to report to her of the character of the Princess di Lauria. "Linda's father, or Herr von Romeiro, would never appear, and still, I hear, has not yet disappeared. "Linda's mother called herself a Roman and a relative of the Prince di Lauria. "In Spain, where I have twice been and inquired, I never could find a residence of a lady by the name of Cesara. "Trillion spiders'-strands of probability spin themselves into an Ariadne's thread in the Labyrinth. "A new, unknown sister is introduced to thee in the Gothic house with veils and in mirrors. "And indeed the illusion is produced upon thee through real mirrors by the honest Baldhead,--who wants something more to be a Christ's-head than the locks, and whom I in autumn called a dog. "The aforesaid Baldhead, or head of Anubis, stood, then, (Heaven and the Devil best know why, but I believe the fact,) as Father of Death on Isola Bella; he lay as travelling journeyman on the Prince's grave and in every sort of ambush, to give thee thy sister for wife--in case I suffered it; but so soon as ever I have sealed this, I sally forth to Spain, break into Linda's picture cabinet, look after a certain likeness of her mother, the place and chamber whereof I have taken pains clearly to ascertain; and if it is the picture by me, then all is right and the thunder may strike into the midst of the whole business. "The Baldhead himself is a fifth quarter of a proof,--he is one of the few men who, when hardly of a spider's thickness, wickedly made water in their mothers' womb. "Perhaps I may find thy uncle, who knew me again here, he said, and who has actually gone off to Valencia.[119]