Oh, so it is ever! So does Fate set fire to the theatre of our little plays, and our bright-painted curtain of Futurity! So does the Serpent of Eternity wind round us and our joys, and crush, like the royal-snake, what it does not poison! Thou good Fixlein!--Ah! last night, I little thought that thou, mild soul, while I was writing beside thee, wert already journeying into the poisonous Earth-shadow of Death.

Last night, late as it was, he opened the lead box found in the old steeple-ball; a catalogue of those who had subscribed to the last repairing of the church was there; and he began to read it now; my presence and his occupations having prevented him before. O, how shall I tell that the record of his birth-year, which I had hidden in the new Ball, was waiting for him in the old one; that in the register of contributions he found his father's name, with the appendage, "given for his new-born son Egidius?"--

This stroke sunk deep into his bosom, even to the rending of it asunder; in this warm hour, full of paternal joy, after such fair days, after such fair employments, after dread of death so often survived, here, in the bright, smooth sea, which is rocking and bearing him along, starts snorting, from the bottomless abyss, the sea-monster Death; and the monster's throat yawns wide, and the silent sea rushes into it in whirlpools, and hurries him along with it.

But the patient man, quietly and slowly, and with a heart silent, though deadly cold, laid the leaves together; looked softly and firmly over the churchyard, where, in the moonshine, the grave of his father was to be distinguished; gazed timidly up to the sky, full of stars, which a white overarching laurel-tree screened from his sight;--and though he longed to be in bed, to settle there and sleep it off, yet he paused at the window to pray for his wife and child, in case this night were his last.

At this moment the steeple-clock struck twelve; but, from the breaking of a pin, the weights kept rolling down, and the clock-hammer struck without stopping,--and he heard with horror the chains and wheels rattling along; and he felt as if Death were hurling forth in a heap all the longer hours which he might yet have had to live,--and now, to his eyes, the churchyard began to quiver and heave, the moonlight flickered on the church-windows, and in the church there were lights flitting to and fro, and in the charnel-house was a motion and a tumult.

His heart fainted within him, and he threw himself into bed, and closed his eyes that he might not see;--but Imagination in the gloom now blew aloft the dust of the dead, and whirled it into giant shapes, and chased these hollow, fever-born masks alternately into lightning and shadow. Then at last from transparent thoughts grew colored visions, and he dreamed this dream. He was standing at the window looking out into the churchyard; and Death, in size as a scorpion, was creeping over it, and seeking for his bones. Death found some arm-bones and thigh-bones on the graves, and said, "They are my bones"; and he took a spine and the bone-legs, and stood with them, and the two arm-bones and clutched with them, and found on the grave of Fixlein's father a skull, and put it on. Then he lifted a scythe beside the little flower-garden, and cried: "Fixlein, where art thou? My finger is an icicle and no finger, and I will tap on thy heart with it." The Skeleton, thus piled together, now looked for him who was standing at the window, and powerless to stir from it; and carried in the one hand, instead of a sand-glass, the ever-striking steeple-clock, and held out the finger of ice, like a dagger, far into the air....

Then he saw his victim above at the window, and raised himself as high as the laurel-tree to stab straight into his bosom with the finger,--and stalked towards him. But as he came nearer, his pale bones grew redder, and vapors floated woolly round his haggard form. Flowers started up from the ground; and he stood transfigured and without the clamm of the grave, hovering above them, and the balm-breath from the flower-cups wafted him gently on;--and as he came nearer, the scythe and clock were gone, and in his bony breast he had a heart, and on his bony head red lips;--and nearer still, there gathered on him soft, transparent, rosebalm-dipped flesh, like the splendor of an Angel flying hither from the starry blue;--and close at hand, he was an Angel with shut snow-white eyelids....

The heart of my friend, quivering like a Harmonica-bell, now melted in bliss in his clear bosom;--and when the Angel opened its eyes, his were pressed together by the weight of celestial rapture, and his dream fled away.----

But not his life; he opened his hot eyes, and--his good wife had hold of his feverish hand, and was standing in room of the Angel.

The fever abated towards morning; but the certainty of dying still throbbed in every artery of the hapless man. He called for his fair little infant into his sick-bed, and pressed it silently, though it began to cry, too hard against his paternal, heavy-laden breast. Then towards noon his soul became cool, and the sultry thunder-clouds within it drew back. And here he described to us the previous (as it were, arsenical) fantasies of his usually quiet head. But it is even those tense nerves, which have not quivered at the touch of a poetic hand striking them to melody of sorrow, that start and fly asunder more easily under the fierce hand of Fate, when with sweeping stroke it smites into discord the firm-set strings.

But towards night his ideas again began rushing in a torch-dance, like fire-pillars round his soul; every artery became a burning-rod, and the heart drove flaming naphtha-brooks into the brain. All within his soul grew bloody; the blood of his drowned brother united itself with the blood which had once flowed from Thiennette's arm, into a bloody rain;--he still thought he was in the garden in the night of betrothment, he still kept calling for bandages to stanch blood, and was for hiding his head in the ball of the steeple. Nothing afflicts one more than to see a reasonable, moderate man, who has been so even in his passions, raving in the poetic madness of fever. And yet if nothing save this mouldering corruption can soothe the hot brain; and if, while the reek and thick vapor of a boiling nervous-spirit and the hissing water-spouts of the veins are encircling and eclipsing the stifled soul, a higher Finger presses through the cloud, and suddenly lifts the poor bewildered spirit from amid the smoke to a sun,--is it more just to complain, than to reflect that Fate is like the oculist, who, when about to open to a blind eye the world of light, first bandages and darkens the other eye that sees?

But the sorrow does affect me, which I read on Thiennette's pale lips, though do not hear. It is not the distortion of an excruciating agony, nor the burning of a dried-up eye, nor the loud lamenting or violent movement of a tortured frame, that I see in her; but what I am forced to see in her, and what too keenly cuts the sympathizing heart, is a pale, still, unmoved, undistorted face, a pale, bloodless head, which Sorrow is as it were holding up after the stroke, like a head just severed by the axe of the headsman; for oh! on this form the wounds, from which the three-edged dagger had been drawn, are all fallen firmly together, and the blood is flowing from them in secret into the choking heart. O Thiennette, go away from the sick-bed, and hide that face which is saying to us: "Now do I know that I shall not have any happiness on Earth; now do I give over hoping,--would this life were but soon done!"

You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this superstition with a nobler one; she had purposely stood farther back at the marriage-altar, and in the bridal-night fallen sooner asleep than he; thereby--as is the popular belief--so to order it that she might also die sooner. Nay, she has determined, if he die, to lay with his corpse a piece of her apparel, that so she may descend the sooner to keep him company in his narrow house. Thou good, thou faithful wife, but thou unhappy one!--