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These were welcome words, and Milcah, who nestled to her comforter's breast, would gladly have heard more; but great restlessness had seized upon the people gazing into the distance from the roof of Amminadab's house; a dense cloud of dust was approaching from the north, and soon after a strange murmur arose, then a loud uproar, and finally shouts and cries from thousands of voices, lowing, neighing, and bleating, such as none of the listeners had ever heard, and then on surged the many-limbed and many-voiced multitude, the endless stream of human beings and herds, which the astrologer's grandson on the observatory of the temple at Tanis had mistaken for the serpent of the nether-world.
Just behind the royal body-guard came the King's gold-and-diamond coach shining in the sunlight of June, with the King and the Queen in it on one side and the Court Astrologer and the fairy Titania, prospective godparents of the little Prince, on the other. The Prince himself, swathed in a wonderful silk mantle edged with pearls and turquoises, slept in the Astrologer's arms.
The shrewd air discouraged lounging and kept the crowd in motion; but the open platforms built for dancing were thronged with couples, and every peep-show, wine-shop and astrologer's booth was packed to the doors.
"The astrologer's prediction?" he cried, catching some of her excitement. "What do you know about that?" "Everything everything!" she exclaimed, exultingly. "Far more than you do, for you only know such a thing exists you know nothing of its contents. Oh, no! mamma guarded her darling boy too carefully for that, notwithstanding your dying father's command. But in spite of her it has come true."
The three days being expired, they went together to the bath, where the prince put on his astrologer's dress: from thence Marzavan conducted him to the neighbourhood of the king of China's palace, where he left him, to go and inform his mother of his arrival.
"Favorable!" exclaimed the gate-keeper, catching up the astrologer's words, and shrugging his shoulders so high that his head disappeared between them. "It is a night of horror, and some great disaster threatens us for certain.
On the night before the day in which he received intelligence of an event that recalled him to his native country, he repaired at an hour accidentally later than usual to the astrologer's abode. On entering the apartment he found Lucilla seated on a low stool beside the astrologer.
"What was the astrologer's prediction that terrible prediction that shortened my father's life?" "It was this that his only son and heir, born on that night, would die by the hand of the common hangman, a murderer's death on the scaffold. Enough to blight any father's life who believed in it, was it not?" "It was devilish. My poor father!
A close observer of what passed on earth, as well as among the heavenly bodies, the pulley and the rope also caught the Astrologer's eye; and as the latter was in a state of vibration he concluded that some one who had been busy adjusting it had been interrupted in the work by his sudden arrival.
Who, besides other things, printed the book of the Garden of Thoughts from wood-blocks, placing at the beginning an astrologer's sphere and a head of himself after the design of Giuseppe Porta of Castelnuovo della Garfagnana; in which book are various fanciful figures, such as Fate, Envy, Calamity, Timidity, Praise, and many others of the same kind, which were held to be most beautiful.
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