At the outermost lantern they stopped. Albano took out the medallion of the decrepit form, under which was inscribed, "_Nous nous verrons un jour, mon frère_"; he surveyed it through the eye-glass; behold, the old face was the young one of his Julienne. Confidently he held the age-imparting glass to the young image, under which was inscribed, "_Nous ne nous verrons jamais, mon fils_"; there appeared a friendly old face, smiling across out of a long life, whose original lay, as having been seen by him, in a deep, dark memory, but nameless; of Linda's mother it had, however, no feature. All at once he heard a familiar voice: "_Ecco, ecco!_[144] my nephew, sir!" It was Albano's uncle, who seemed to drag along the black-dressed, wailing Schoppe, and weepingly addressed his nephew: "Ah, _neveu!_ O, I speak the truth, only truth _pour jamais_." He looked laughing, and thought he wept. The black coat stepped nearer, become a green coat, and said, "Sir Count, don't let yourself be deceived a minute; our acquaintance begins with a mutual loss." "My Schoppe," said Albano, agitated, "knowest thou me no more?" "O that I were he now! My name is Siebenkäs," replied the green coat, and threw up his hands into the air in token of lamentation. "He lies there, however, in the chapel," said the Spaniard; "I will relate all so truly that it is beautiful." Albano cast a glance into the chapel, and, with a cry of pain, fell headlong. 139. CYCLE. Schoppe's history was, according to Wehrfritz's and the uncle's telling, this: He had started up glowing out of the constrained slumber; the snorting war-steed of vindictive fury against the Spaniard had hurried him away. In the hotel-yard of the latter the servant had directed him with a lie to the castle. Here, amidst the confused tumult about the suffering Prince, he had reached, unasked, unseen, the mirror-room where he had once begged of the Countess Linda Idoine's word of peace for his distracted friend. When the cylindrical mirror which graves the long years of age on the young face, and shakes thereon the moss and rubbish of time, threw out at him his image wasted with madness, said he, "Ho, ho! the old _I_ lurks somewhere in the neighborhood," and looked grimly round. Out of the mirrors of the mirrors he saw a whole people of _I_'s looking at him. He sprang upon a chair, to unhang a long mirror. While he was starting the nail of the same, a clock in the wall struck twelve times. Here the prediction of Gaspard came into his head, which his friend had confided to him, and all the rules which the latter had prescribed to him for the solution of the riddles. The prediction mentioned, indeed, a picture-gallery, but a mirror-room is itself one, only more vacillating, and deeper in behind the wall. He took down the mirror, according to the rules given by Gaspard, found and opened the arras-door corresponding to the size of the mirror; the wooden female form, with the open souvenir in her