Now there was a leaven of improbability in this tale, and it leavened the whole lump.  Ganders do not roost; there is not one in a hundred of them that could sit on a fender long enough to say Jack Robinson.  So, as the Frau lived a thousand years before the birth of common sense—­say about a half century ago—­when everything uncommon had a smell of the supernatural, there was nothing for it but to consider her a witch.  Had she been very feeble and withered, the people would have burned her, out of hand; but they did not like to proceed to extremes without perfectly legal evidence.  They were cautious, for they had made several mistakes recently.  They had sentenced two or three females to the stake, and upon being stripped the limbs and bodies of these had not redeemed the hideous promise of their shrivelled faces and hands.  Justice was ashamed of having toasted comparatively plump and presumably innocent women; and the punishment of this one was wisely postponed until the proof should be all in.

But in the meantime a graceless youth, named Hans Blisselwartle, made the startling discovery that none of the fowls that pursued the Frau ever came back to boast of it.  A brief martial career seemed to have weaned them from the arts of peace and the love of their kindred.  Full of unutterable suspicion, Hans one day followed in the rear of an exciting race between the timorous dame and an avenging pullet.  They were too rapid for him; but bursting suddenly in at the lady’s door some fifteen minutes afterward, he found her in the act of placing the plucked and eviscerated Nemesis upon her cooking range.  The Frau betrayed considerable confusion; and although the accusing Blisselwartle could not but recognize in her act a certain poetic justice, he could not conceal from himself that there was something grossly selfish and sordid in it.  He thought it was a good deal like bottling an annoying ghost and selling him for clarified moonlight; or like haltering a nightmare and putting her to the cart.

When it transpired that the Frau ate her feathered persecutors, the patience of the villagers refused to honour the new demand upon it:  she was at once arrested, and charged with prostituting a noble superstition to a base selfish end.  We will pass over the trial; suffice it she was convicted.  But even then they had not the heart to burn a middle-aged woman, with full rounded outlines, as a witch, so they broke her upon the wheel as a thief.

[Illustration]

The reckless antipathy of the domestic fowls to this inoffensive lady remains to be explained.  Having rejected her theory, I am bound in honour to set up one of my own.  Happily an inventory of her effects, now before me, furnishes a tolerably safe basis.  Amongst the articles of personal property I note “One long, thin, silken fishing line, and hook.”  Now if I were a barn-yard fowl—­say a goose—­and a lady not a friend of mine were to pass me, munching