"O ho!" Schoppe broke out, inwardly shrinking up the while. Albano grew pale. Schoppe collected himself again, stared sharply and courageously at the repulsive shape, which rolled its withered but rosy skin to and fro upon sharp, high cheek-bones, and said: "If you understand me, prophetic gallows-bird and cock-sparrow, and are not yourself crack-brained, then am I in a condition to prove that one can make very little of a case out of such a thing as madness." Hereupon he showed--but as one cooled-down, burnt-out, and deserted by his host of images--that madness, like epilepsy, gave more pain to the spectator than the performer; for it was only an earlier death, a longer dream, a day-walking instead of night-walking; for the most part, it gave what the whole of life and virtue and wisdom could not,--an _enduring_ agreeable idea.[53] Even if, which was rare, it chained a man to a tormenting one, still this became, nevertheless, a panoply against all bodily sufferings. He had, therefore, for himself, never feared madness any more than dreaming, but could not bear to hear others speak, or even to see them, in either of these states. "We shudder," said Albano, "at a man who talks to us in his sleep as to an absent person, or who, when awake, talks only to himself alone; and whenever I hear myself soliloquize, it is just the same." "I am no philosopher," said the Baldhead, indifferently, whose perfect, shining baldness was more frightful than hateful. Schoppe asked angrily, "Who he was, then, _quis_ and _quid_ and _quibus auxiliis_, and _cur_ and _quomodo_ and _quando_."[54] "_Quando?_--After fifteen months I come again. _Quis?_--Nothing; God uses me only when he has to make some one unhappy," said the bald one, and begged a glass and the liberty of drinking with them. Albano, freely granting it, said, in an inquiring tone, he had probably just arrived? "Just from the great Bernhard," said the bald one, growing more repulsive with every word, because his old rosy face was a zigzag of convulsive distortions, so that at every moment a different man seemed to be standing there. He went out a moment. Schoppe, quite beside himself, said: "I grow more and more exasperated with him, as with a hideous, hovering fever-image. For God's sake, let us go. I have a feeling behind me all the time, as if a wicked fist were thrusting me upon him, that I should strangle him. He grows, too, more and more familiar to me, like an old moss-grown deadly foe." Albano answered softly: "See, my presentiment! But now that I have not hearkened to it, I must even see where it will come out." His courageous nature, his romantic history and position, would not let him draw back from a prospect so full of adventure.