"My heart grew cold as a dog's nose, and my tongue full of stone. 'As _convictus_ and _confessus_,' began thy father, 'you can now prophesy your fate.' 'To be sure,' murmured the uncle, pulling out and putting back his handkerchief, taking the picture up and laying it away,--'prophesy, prophesy!' 'Meanwhile,' thy father continued, 'it is freely left with you whether you will, until a nearer investigation, choose, instead of the prison, which belongs to you in consideration of the murder and theft, a milder place, the madhouse, which befits you in consideration of your journey; if you do not choose, then I choose for you.' 'To the madhouse, to the madhouse!' cried I, 'for the sake of true sociability, on my honor. But I make no questions about anything; on the washing-bill of my conscience stands no murder. Do you only burn yourselves white and clean. Your chariot of the sun and triumphal car goes up to the very hub in dung. Countess, let, I pray, everything be cleared up by you in the best manner, and think unceasingly of me, in order to get a father, like the students' father of his country, to be sure, who consists in a hole through the hat.'[141] 'Step farther back!' said thy father to thy uncle, 'the madness is broken out.' Upon that the hare made eighteen springs down over thresholds and steps. I executed my own orders of march and halt. Thy father still crawled after me with a licking, flamy look. I charged my eye with poison, and saw him, down below at the door, fall headlong at the stroke." Albano shuddered, and inquired about the how. Then Schoppe was silent, buried in thought, for a long time, and said, in a troubled tone, "That, to be sure, was only a dream of mine; but so do I now confound dream with reality, and the reverse. I ought to be more moved about Schoppe; he is, after all, an old man, and old men weep like the jester, when it goes down hill." "I will comfort thee now, my friend," said Albano, with distracted breast; "I will remove an error from thy faithful heart, and then thou wilt certainly go with me. This Baldhead, our mocker and juggler, is, according to the holy word of my sister, one and the same person with my uncle, and is a ventriloquist." Schoppe stood for a long time like one dead, as if he had not heard a word. Suddenly, with radiant face and sparkling eye, he threw himself on his knee, and stammered, "Heaven, Heaven! make me mad! The rest I will do." Here he made a wicked neck-wringing motion with his hands, and said, in a tone of restored strength, "I can follow thee." He really could now, but before he had hardly been able to stand. And so Albano led the unhappy, excited friend with heavy heart to his own lodgings. 136. CYCLE.