"Wild, awful tones, come up from the deep! Bring me my bloody bridal dress! It is time; declining joy casts behind a long, lengthening shadow." Albano and Julienne recognized with a shudder, in the little coat which they brought him, the blood-sprinkled one which he had worn at the masquerade, when, as a boy, he had meant to murder himself before Linda. "You must lay it on my cold breast," said he, as he received it from Falterle. The thunder rolled nearer, the lightnings became more glowing, and one cloud after another swelled the tempest. He drank the glasses fast. "Nothing can now harm me," said he; "even the lightning not specially, although I lie under trees; in this tube there is a lightning that defies all lightnings,--a real lightning-rod." The hastening storm drove him, on the spectators' account, to the conclusion, and he was roused to indignation at the mockery of Providence over his theatrical preparations. "Nothing is more pleasant and timely than this tempest," said Gaspard; "however, talking and waiting seem to gratify him tolerably." The other spectators were agonized by the scene, and yet not one tore himself away. Orders had been given to the fellow-performers to take the shot as the signal-word, and not to come before it. He said, "The death-snake rattles in the neighborhood; yonder, on the wave of the future, the corpse comes swimming on." They perceived that he spoke at random and extempore, vexed by the storm. He looked upon the pistol. "A glance at thee! So is the look at life taken, and again hidden under the eyelid. A spark, a single spark, and the theatre-curtain blazes up, and I see the spectators stand, spirits, or even nothing at all, and the eternal, heavy cloud fills the wide ether of the world. So stand I, then, by the dead sea of eternity; so black, still, wide, deep it lies below me; one step, and I am in there, and sink forever. Let it come! I swam therein even before my birth. Now, now," said he, while it sprinkled, and he took the last glass, "the rain will chill the poor wretch already sinking into the chill of death. Play now something soft and beautiful, good people!"