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 [v]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
mountain side. The brow, with its massive depth and loftiness, and all
the other features, indeed, were bold and strong. But the grand
expression of a divine sympathy that illuminated the mountain visage
might here be sought in vain.

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 shouting 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."

V

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 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 wise thoughts in his mind. 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