n is made up of nothing but whims!"

"Doubtless!" replied his irritated friend; "and you afford me ample
opportunity for finding that it is so. I fancied that after our
agreement you would have given me this one evening; but--"

"But it is the carnival, you know," interposed the other; "and all my
acquaintances, and divers fair ladies are expecting me at the grand
ball tonight. Rely upon it, my dear friend, it is mere disease in you
that makes you so unreasonably averse to all such amusements."

"Which of us has the fairest claim to be called diseased," said
Emilius, "I will not examine. But I cannot think that your
incomprehensible frivolousness, your hunger and thirst for
dissipation, your restless chase after pleasures that leave the heart
empty, are altogether the healthiest state of human nature. On certain
points at all events you might make a little allowance for my
weakness, if you are determined to call it so; and you know there is
nothing in the world that so sets my whole soul on edge as a ball with
its frightful music. Somebody has said, that to a deaf person who
cannot hear the music a party of dancers must look like so many
patients for a madhouse: but to my mind this detestable music itself,
this twirling and whirling and pirouetting of half a dozen notes, each
treading on its own heels, in those odious tunes, which ram themselves
into our memory, nay, I might say, mix themselves up with our very
blood, so that one cannot get rid of the taint for many a woful day
after,--this to me is the very trance of madness: and if I could ever
bring myself to think dancing endurable, it would be dancing to the
tune of silence."

"Bravo, signor paradox-monger!" exclaimed the mask: "You are so far
gone, that you choose to think the most natural, the most innocent,
and the 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 unhappy, and have often all but
driven me out of my senses. They are to me the ghosts and spectres and
furies in the world of sound, and they come and buz round my head, and
grin at me with horrid laughter."

"Sheer nervousness!" returned the other; "just like your extravagant
abhorrence of spiders and divers other harmless insects."

"Harmless you call them!" cried Emilius indignantly, "because you have
no repugnance to such things. To him however that feels the same
disgust and loat