Wehrfritz asked him whether he should still send him a horse to ride into the city. "Me! I ever go into the city again?" asked Albano. "No, good father; Schoppe and I go to-day into the Prince's garden." He was terrified at the mere black churchyard-landscape of the city, where once had bloomed for him a golden sunshine, and leafy avenues and heaven's-gates full of flowery festoons. O, the young honey of love, the old wine of friendship; both were indeed poured by fate into graves! The dead man was carried into the new castle of the Prince's garden. Only Albano and Siebenkäs followed him. When they were alone, Albano saw for the first time that the friend of his friend trembled and wavered, and that until now only the spirit had sustained the body. "Now can we both," said Albano, "mourn before each other; but only in you do I believe. God, how then was his end?" Siebenkäs described to him the last looks and tones of the poor man. "O God!" said Albano, "he died not easily; when the madness of months became one minute,--rending must have been the hell-flood which snatched away so firm a life." Siebenkäs could with difficulty admit the belief of his madness, because the deceased had so often, in his best moments, been similarly misapprehended; but Albano at last convinced him. He related further, that on his journey home he had been startled, when the repeated mistaking of his person for the deceased led him to the presumption that his long separated Leibgeber must be sojourning here, although he could not but dread to think of the first appearing and comparison. "For, Sir Count," said he, "years and business, particularly juristical, ah! and life itself, always draw man farther down,--at first out of ether into air, then out of the air on to the earth. 'Will he know me?' said I. I am truly no more the man that I was, and the physiognomical likeness might well have still remained the only and strongest one. But this, too, had passed away; the blessed one there looks still as he did ten years ago. O, only a free soul never grows old! Sir Count, I was once a man, who played one and another joke with life, and with death too, and I would cry out, 'Heavens! if hell should get loose!' and more of the like. Ah, Leibgeber, Leibgeber! Time has delicate little waves, but the sharpest-cornered pebble, after all, becomes smooth and blunt therein at last."[145]