All this while the people were throwing up their hats and shouting, with enthusiasm so contagious that the heart of Ernest kindled up, and he likewise threw up his hat, and shouted, as loudly as the loudest, ’Huzza for the great man!  Huzza for Old Stony Phiz!’ But as yet he had not seen him.

‘Here he is, now!’ cried those who stood near Ernest.  ’There!  There!  Look at Old Stony Phiz and then at the Old Man of the Mountain, and see if they are not as like as two twin brothers!’

In the midst of all this gallant array came an open barouche, drawn by four white horses; and in the barouche, with his massive head uncovered, sat the illustrious statesman, Old Stony Phiz himself.

‘Confess it,’ said one of Ernest’s neighbors 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 mountainside.  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 etherealized 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 neighbor 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 neighbor; 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.’