dark clouds with loud shrieks, as though in its midst stood a charnel and
gallows, and from the brushwood likewise, by the pool's edge, came other
cries of birds, all as full of complaining as though they were bewailing
the griefs of the whole world.

Here we stayed our horses, and called and shouted; but none made answer,
save only toads and crows. "This is the place, for certain," said Young
Kubbeling, and Grubner the head forester, sprang to his feet to help him
down from his tall mare. The gentlemen likewise dismounted, and were
about to follow the Trunswicker across the mead to the place where
Eppelein had been found; but he bid them not, inasmuch as they would mar
the track he would fain discover.

They, then, stood still and gazed after him, as I did likewise; and my
fears waxed greater till I verily believed that the crows were indeed
birds of ill-omen, as I saw a large black swarm of them wheel croaking
round Kubbeling. He, meanwhile, stooped low, seeking any traces on the
frosted grass, and his short, thick-set body seemed for all the world one
of the imps, or pixies, which dwell among the roots of trees and in the
holes in the rocks. He crept about with heedful care and never a word,
prying as he went, and presently I could see that he shook his big head
as though in doubt, nay, or in sorrow. I shuddered again, and meseemed
the grey clouds in the sky waxed blacker, while deathly pale airy forms
floated through the mist over the pools, in long, waving winding-sheets.
The thick black heads of the bulrushes stood up motionless like grave-
stones, and the grey silken tufts of the bog-grass, fluttering in the
cold breath of a November morning, were as ghostly hands, threatening or
warning me.

Ere long I was to forget the crows, and the fogs, and the reed-grass, and