natural pretensions. The dignity of her deportment, and the numbers of
her attendants, sufficiently proclaimed the luxurious accommodations
which her habits might have taught her to expect; and she was now
entering a dwelling which of late years had received few strangers of
her sex, and probably none but those of the lowest rank.

"Know your distance, fellow!" exclaimed one of the waiting-women,
angrily, noticing his rude gaze and the effect upon her mistress.

"Good faith, madam, I would that the distance between us were more; it
was no prayers of mine, I promise you, that brought upon me a troop of
horses to Waldenhausen, enough in one twelve hours to eat me out a
margrave's ransom. Light thanks I reckon on from yagers; and the
payments of dragoons will pass current for as little in the forest, as
a lady's frown in Waldenhausen."

"Churl!" said an officer of dragoons, "how know you that our payments
are light? The emperor takes nothing without payment; surely not from
such as you. But _a propos_ of ransoms, what now might be Holkerstein's
ransom for a farmer's barns stuffed with a three years' crop?"

"How mean you by that, captain? The crop's my own, and never was in
worse hands than my own. God send it no worse luck to-day!"

"Come, come, sir, you understand me better than that; nothing at
Waldenhausen, I take it, is yours or any man's, unless by license from
Holkerstein. And when I see so many goodly barns and garners, with
their jolly charges of hay and corn, that would feed one of
Holkerstein's garrisons through two sieges, I know what to think of him
who has saved them scot-free. He that serves a robber must do it on a