with his hands clasped. For a moment or two after the old woman
had ended her story, he sat staring silently at her. Then he
cried out, in a sharp voice, "And is this truth that you tell
me, Ursela? and did my father seek to rob the towns people of
their goods?"

Old Ursela laughed. "Aye," said she, "that he did and many
times. Ah! me, those day's are all gone now." And she fetched a
deep sigh. "Then we lived in plenty and had both silks and
linens and velvets besides in the store closets and were able to
buy good wines and live in plenty upon the best. Now we dress in
frieze and live upon what we can get and sometimes that is
little enough, with nothing better than sour beer to drink. But
there is one comfort in it all, and that is that our good Baron
paid back the score he owed the Trutz-Drachen people not only
for that, but for all that they had done from the very first."

Thereupon she went on to tell Otto how Baron Conrad had
fulfilled the pledge of revenge that he had made Abbot Otto, how
he had watched day after day until one time he had caught the
Trutz-Drachen folk, with Baron Frederick at their head, in a
narrow defile back of the Kaiserburg; of the fierce fight that
was there fought; of how the Roderburgs at last fled, leaving
Baron Frederick behind them wounded; of how he had kneeled
before the Baron Conrad, asking for mercy, and of how Baron
Conrad had answered, "Aye, thou shalt have such mercy as thou
deservest," and had therewith raised his great two-handed sword
and laid his kneeling enemy dead at one blow.

Poor little Otto had never dreamed that such cruelty and