Sperver kept on humming and laughing.  Suddenly putting his hand upon the dwarf’s misshapen back, he cried—­

“Silence!  Here is Knapwurst, our historian and chronicler!  He is preparing to speak.  This hump holds all the history of the house of Nideck from the beginning of time!”

The little hunchback, not at all indignant at so ambiguous a compliment, directed his benevolent eyes upon the face of the huntsman, and replied—­

“You, Sperver, you are one of the reiters whose story I have been telling you.  You have the arm, and the courage, and the whiskers of a reiter of old!  If that window opened wide, and a reiter was to hold out his hand at the end of his long arm to you, what would you say to him?”

“I would say, ’You are welcome, comrade; sit down and drink.  You will find the wine just as good and the girls just as pretty as they were in the days of old Hugh Lupus.’  Look!”

And he pointed with his glass at the jolly young faces that brightened the farther end of the table.

Certainly the damsels of Nideck were lovely.  Some were blushing with pleasure to hear their own praises; others half-veiled their rosy cheeks with their long drooping eyelashes, while one or two seemed rather to prefer to display their, sweet blue eyes by raising them to the smoky ceiling.  I wondered at my own insensibility that I had never before noticed these fair roses blooming in the towers of the ancient manor.

“Silence!” cried Sperver for the second time.  “Our friend Knapwurst is going to tell us again the legend he related to us just now.”

“Won’t you have another instead?” asked the hunchback.

“No.  I like this best.”

“I know better ones than that.”

“Knapwurst,” insisted the huntsman, raising his finger impressively, “I have reasons for wishing to hear the same again and no other.  Cut it shorter if you like.  There is a great deal in it.  Now, Fritz, listen!”

The dwarf, rather under the influence of the sparkling wine he had taken, rested his elbows on the table, and with his cheeks clutched in his bony fingers, and his eyes starting from his head with his concentrated efforts to speak with becoming seriousness, he cried as if he were publishing a proclamation—­

“Bernard Hertzog relates that the burgrave Hugh, surnamed Lupus, or the Wolf, when he was old, used to wear a cowl, which was a kind of knitted cap that covered in the crest of the knight’s helmet when engaged in fighting.  When the helmet tired him he would take it off and put on the knitted cowl, and its long cape fell around his shoulders.

“Up to his eighty-second year Hugh still wore his armour, though he could hardly breathe in it.

“Then he sent for Otto of Burlach, his chaplain, his eldest son Hugh, his second son Berthold, and his daughter the red-haired Bertha, wife of a Saxon chief named Bluderich, and said to them—­