“Confess it,” said one of Ernest’s neighbours to him, “the Great Stone Face has met its match at last!”

Now, it must be owned that, at his first glimpse of the countenance which was bowing and smiling from the barouche, Ernest did fancy that there was a resemblance between it and the old familiar face upon the mountain-side.  The brow, with its massive depth and loftiness, and all the other features, indeed, were boldly and strongly hewn, as if in emulation of a more than heroic, of a Titanic model.  But the sublimity and stateliness, the grand expression of a divine sympathy, that illuminated the mountain visage, and etherealised its ponderous granite substance into spirit, might here be sought in vain.  Something had been originally left out, or had departed.  And therefore the marvellously gifted statesman had always a weary gloom in the deep caverns of his eyes, as of a child that has outgrown its playthings, or a man of mighty faculties and little aims, whose life, with all its high performances, was vague and empty, because no high purpose had endowed it with reality.

Still, Ernest’s neighbour was thrusting his elbow into his side, and pressing him for an answer.

“Confess! confess!  Is not he the very picture of your Old Man of the Mountain?”

“No!” said Ernest, bluntly, “I see little or no likeness.”

“Then so much the worse for the Great Stone Face!” answered his neighbour; and again he set up a shout for Old Stony Phiz.

But Ernest turned away, melancholy, and almost despondent:  for this was the saddest of his disappointments, to behold a man who might have fulfilled the prophecy, and had not willed to do so.  Meantime, the cavalcade, the banners, the music, and the barouches swept past him, with the vociferous crowd in the rear, leaving the dust to settle down, and the Great Stone Face to be revealed again, with the grandeur that it had worn for untold centuries.

“Lo, here I am, Ernest!” the benign lips seemed to say.  “I have waited longer than thou, and am not yet weary.  Fear not; the man will come.”

The years hurried onward, treading in their haste on one another’s heels.  And now they began to bring white hairs, and scatter them over the head of Ernest; they made reverend wrinkles across his forehead, and furrows in his cheeks.  He was an aged man.  But not in vain had he grown old; more than the white hairs on his head were the sage thoughts in his mind; his wrinkles and furrows were inscriptions that Time had graved, and in which he had written legends of wisdom that had been tested by the tenor of a life.  And Ernest had ceased to be obscure.  Unsought for, undesired, had come the fame which so many seek, and made him known in the great world, beyond the limits of the valley in which he had dwelt so quietly.  College professors, and even the active men of cities, came from far to see and converse with Ernest; for the report had gone abroad that this simple husbandman