Albano, while listening, felt himself singularly changed, which he could ascribe only to the punch,--it was less intoxication than glow; a flying blaze roared over his inner world, and the red lustre hovered about on its farthest borders; now did it seem to him as if he stood entirely on the same ground with the Baldhead, and could wrestle with this evil genius. "I had a sister, too," said Albano; "can one call up the dead?" "No, but the dying," said the Baldhead. "Ugh!" said Albano, shuddering. "Whom would you see?" asked the Baldhead. "A living sister, whom I never have seen yet," said Albano, in a glow. "It requires," said the Baldhead, "a little sleep, and your knowing also where your sister was on her last birthday." Luckily Julienne, whom he took for his sister, had, on _hers_, been at the Palace in Lilar. He told him so. "Then come with me!" said the Baldhead. At this moment Schoppe's servant brought Albano a sword-cane and the following note:-- "Brother, brother, trust him not. Here is a weapon, for thou art quite too foolhardy. Run him right through, if he does so much as make faces. All sorts of unknown people have this evening asked after thee and thy whereabouts. It is to me as if no life at all were safe to me from the beast,--thine or hers. Be on thy guard, and come! Schoppe. "Run him through, however, I pray thee." "Are you afraid, perhaps?" asked the Baldhead. "That will appear," said Albano, angrily, and, taking the sword-cane, went with him. As the two passed through the little, dark anteroom of the cellar, Albano saw in a mirror his own head set in a fiery ring. They passed out of the city into the open country. The bald one went ahead. The sky was bright with stars. It seemed to the Count as if he heard the subterranean waters and fires of the globe and the creation. Hardly did he recognize out there the way to Blumenbühl. Suddenly the bald one ran into a field on the left. The lean joiner's wife stood on the Blumenbühl road quite stiff, and saw abstractedly a corpse move along invisible, and heard the far-off bell, which is borne by the mute Death. So it seemed. Then did Albano follow the Baldhead more daringly: the fear of spirits kills the fear of man. Both moved along in silence beside each other. In the depth of the distance, it seemed as if a man floated, without walking or stirring, slowly and steadily onward through the air. The white skin on the bald one twitched incessantly, and one invisible fist after another thrust itself forth from the clay of his face, as in the act of striking. Once there flitted over it the look of the Father of Death.[56]