s the carnival, you know,' pursued the other, 'and all my
acquaintances and certain fair ladies are expecting me at the grand ball
to-night. Assure yourself, my good friend, it is mere disease in you that
makes you so unreasonable against all such matters.'

'Which of us has the fairest claim to disease,' said Emilius, 'I will not
examine. At least your inconceivable frivolousness, your hunger and thirst
after stop-gaps for every hour you are awake, your wild-goose chase after
pleasures that leave the heart empty, seem not to me altogether the
healthiest state of the soul. In certain things, at all events, you might
make a little allowance for my weakness, if it must once for all pass for
such: and there is nothing in the world that so jars through and through me
as a ball with its frightful music. Somebody once said, that to a deaf
person who cannot hear the music, a set of dancers must look like so many
patients for a mad-house; but, in my opinion, this dreadful music itself,
this twirling and whirling and pirouetting of half a dozen notes, each
treading on its own heels, in those accursed tunes which ram themselves
into our memories, yea, I might say, mix themselves up with our very blood,
so that one cannot get rid of their taint for many a miserable day
after--this to me is the very trance of madness; and if I could ever bring
myself to think dancing endurable, it must be dancing to the tune of
silence.'

'Well done, signor Paradox-monger!' exclaimed the mask. 'Why, you are so far
gone, that you think the most natural, most innocent, and merriest thing in
the world unnatural, ay, and shocking.'

'I cannot change my feelings,' said his grave friend. 'From my very
childhood these tunes have made me wretched, and have often well-nigh driven
me out of my senses. They are to me the ghosts and spectres and furies in
the world of sound, and come thus and buzz round my head, and grin at me
with horrid laughter.'

'All nervous irritability!' returned the other; 'just like your extravagant
abhorrence of spiders and many other harmless insects.'

'Harmless you call them,' cried Emilius, now quite untuned, 'because you
have no repugnance toward them. To one, however, who feels the same disgust
and loathing, the same nameless horror, that I feel, rise up in his soul and
shoot through his whole being at the sight of them, these miscreate
deformities, such as toads, spiders, or that most loathsome of nature's
excrements, the