is music had remained untouched and unweakened,
that it had here resumed its fantastic devilishness? Frederick felt as if
new cords were biting into his flesh and tightening about his throat.
Something like the anguish and frenzy of a bull with a lasso about its
horns came over him--a bull whom a cruel power will misuse for a
senseless, bloody show in the arena. Frederick did not hit about him. He
did not run away, and yet he came near doing both. His head, it seemed to
him, was wrapped up heavily in thick sail-cloth. He must do something
finally to rid himself of that enforced blindness. He must look straight
in the face of his grotesque opponent--Prospero or Caliban?

"There is no doubt," Frederick felt, while the music tortured and
harrowed him, "that men seek madness, they seek it again and again. They
are fond of madness. Was not madness the leader of those men who first
made the impossible possible and crossed the ocean, though they were
neither fish nor fowl?"

In Skagen in Denmark there is a sight worth seeing. In the dining-room of
a small inn there are painted figureheads of foundered vessels saved from
the wreckage. The hand of madness has unmistakably touched all those
wooden men and women with their painted faces and clothes. They look
forward into the distance, where they seem to see something beyond all.
Their noses quiver in the air on the scent of gold and foreign spices.
In some way or other they have come upon a secret and have lifted their
feet from their native land to tread the air and pursue illusions and
phantasmagoria and discover new secrets in the trackless salt waste. It
was by such that El Dorado was discovered. It was such that have led
millions and millions of men to their destruction.

And Ingigerd Hahlstroem, who shortly before had been his painted Madonna
of wood, now became Frederick's ecstatic figurehead. He saw her high
above the waves on the prow of a phantom sailing ship, bent forward
with open mouth and wide eyes, her yellow hair falling straight down from
both sides of her head.

The music ceased, and Ingigerd Hahlstroem stepped on the stage. She was
wearing a long blue evening cloak over her costume.

"Mr. Lilienfeld, I think it is rather stupid to change the name of my
number from 'Mara, the Spider's Victim' to 'Oberon's Revenge,'" she said
very dryly.

"Miss Hahlstroem," said the impresario, nervously, "please, for heaven's
sake, leave that to me. I know the audiences he