him. He could not refrain from speaking of it to a very old woman,
who sat knitting by the window of the dining-room, in a high-backed,
old-fashioned arm-chair. I believe she was the innkeeper's
grandmother. At all events she was old enough to be so. She took off
her owl-eyed spectacles, and, as she wiped the glasses with her
handkerchief, said;

"Thou dear Heaven! Is it possible! Did you never hear of the
Christ of Andernach?"

Flemming answered in the negative.

"Thou dear Heaven!" continued the old woman. "It is a very
wonderful story; and a true one, as every good Christian in
Andernach will tell you. And it all happened before the deathof my
blessed man, four years ago, let me see,--yes, four years ago, come
Christmas."

Here the old woman stopped speaking, but went on with her
knitting. Other thoughts seemed to occupy her mind. She was
thinking, no doubt, of her blessed man, as German widows call their
dead husbands. But Flemming having expressed an ardent wish to hear
the wonderful story, she told it, in nearly the following words.

"There was once a poor old woman in Andernach whose name was Frau
Martha, and she lived all alone in a house by herself, and loved all
the Saints and the blessed Virgin, and was as good as an angel, and
sold pies down by the Rheinkrahn. But her house was very old, and
the roof-tiles were broken, and she was too poor to get new ones,
and the rain kept coming in, and no Christian soul in Andernach