While I was thus sitting there, suddenly I heard the sound of horses’ hoofs in the forest.  I held my breath and listened as the sound came nearer and nearer, until I could hear the horses snorting.  Soon afterward two horsemen appeared under the trees, but paused at the edge of the woods, and talked together in low, very eager tones, as I could see by the moving shadows which were thrown across the bright village-green, and by their long dark arms pointing in various directions.  How often at home, when my mother, now dead, had told me of savage forests and fierce robbers, had I privately longed to be a part of such a story!  I was well paid now for my silly, rash longings.  I reached up the linden-tree, beneath which I was sitting, as high as I could, unobserved, until I clasped the lowest branch, and then I swung myself up.  But just as I had got my body half across the branch, and was about to drag my legs up after it, one of the horsemen trotted briskly across the green toward me.  I shut my eyes tight amid the thick foliage, and did not stir.  “Who is there?” a voice called directly under me.  “Nobody!” I yelled in terror at being detected, although I could not but laugh to myself at the thought of how the rogues would look when they should turn my empty pockets inside out.  “Aha!” said the robber, “whose are these legs, then, hanging down here?” There was no help for it.  “They are,” I replied, “only a couple of legs of a poor, lost musician.”  And I hastily let myself drop, for I was ashamed to hang there any longer like a broken fork.

The rider’s horse shied when I dropped so suddenly from the tree.  He patted the animal’s neck, and said, laughing, “Well, we too are lost, so we are comrades; perhaps you can help us to find the road to B. You shall be no loser by it.”  I assured him that I knew nothing about the road to B., and said that I would ask in the inn, or would conduct them to the village.  But the man would not listen to reason; he drew from his girdle a pistol, the barrel of which glittered in the moonlight.  “My dear fellow,” he said in a very friendly tone, as he wiped off the glittering barrel and then ran his eye along it—­“my dear fellow, you will have the kindness to go yourself before us to B.”

Verily, I was in a scrape.  If I chanced to hit the right road, I should certainly get into the midst of the robber band and be beaten because I had no money; if I did not find the road, I should be beaten of course.  I wasted very little thought upon the matter, but took the first road at hand, the one past the inn which led away from the village.  The horseman galloped back to his companion, and both followed me slowly at some distance.  Thus we wandered on foolishly enough at hap-hazard through the moonlit night.  The road led through forests on the side of a mountain.  Sometimes we could see, above the tops of the pines stirring darkly beneath us, far abroad into the deep, silent valleys; now and then a nightingale