one to himself.
    These various incidents had furnished abundant matter for conversation in
Klosterheim, and had carried the public expectation to the highest pitch of
anxiety, some time before the great evening arrived. Leisure had been allowed
for fear, and every possible anticipation of the wildest character, to unfold
themselves. Hope, even, amongst many, was a predominant sensation. Ladies were
preparing for hysterics. Cavaliers, besides the swords which they wore as
regular articles of dress, were providing themselves with stilettoes against any
sudden rencontre hand to hand, or any unexpected surprise. Armourers and
furbishers of weapons were as much in request as the more appropriate artists
who minister to such festal occasions. These again were summoned to give their
professional aid and attendance to an extent so much out of proportion to their
numbers and their natural power of exertion that they were harassed beyond all
physical capacity of endurance, and found their ingenuity more heavily taxed to
find personal substitutes amongst the trades most closely connected with their
own than in any of the contrivances which more properly fell within the business
of their own art. Tailors, horse-milliners, shoemakers, friseurs, drapers,
mercers, tradesmen of every description, and servants of every class and
denomination, were summoned to a sleepless activity - each in his several
vocation, or in some which he undertook by proxy. Artificers who had escaped on
political motives from Nuremburg and other Imperial cities, or from the sack of
Magdeburg, now showed their ingenuity, and their readiness to earn the bread of
industry; and, if Klosterheim resembled a hive in the close-packed condition of
its inhabitants, it was now seen that the resemblance held good hardly less in
the industry which, upon a sufficient excitement, it was able to develop. But in
the midst of all this stir, din, and unprecedented activity, whatever occupation
each man found for his thoughts or for his hands in his separate employments,
all hearts were mastered by one domineering interest - the approaching collision
of the Landgrave, before his assembled court, with the mysterious agent who had
so long troubled his repose.
 

                                  Chapter XIV

The day at length arrived; the guards were posted in unusual strength; the pages
of honour, and servants in their state-dresses, were drawn up in long and
gorgeous files along the sides of the vast gothic halls, which ran in continued
succession from the front of the schloss to the more modern saloons in the rear;
bands of military music, collected from amongst the foreign prisoners of various
nations at Vienna, were stationed in their national costume - Italian,
Hungarian, Turkish, or Croatian - in