“Is it some serpent that he sees?” said the fine young lord.

It was a little old man, who stepped out from among the bushes.  He was dressed in a black mantle.  Out he came, right into the middle of the road, closed his arms on his breast, and said in a dull voice, “Baron Durer, can you tell me what is the distance from a shepherd’s hovel to a king’s palace?”

“That which there is betwixt the earth and the sun,” was the reply of the haughty upstart.

At this, the old man threw his cloak open, and showed himself to the Minister, as he had shown himself twenty years before, on that very spot, to the scholar John Durer.  The Counsellor was little changed in appearance, except in his hair, which had been black, and was now white as the snow of winter.

John Durer’s visage was mostly pale; but when he recognized that old man, it became as red as blood.  It was the third time that he had blushed face to face with his former patron.  Then the old man cried in a louder voice,—­

“Does the scholar of the village remember one Counsellor Werter?”

“The Minister remembers nothing of the scholar,” was the cold and arrogant answer.

“What, then, does he remember?” said the old man, pressing a little nearer.

“Nothing!” cried the fine young lord, and he buried his spurs in the sides of his courser.  They went off at a fierce gallop.

V.

But the fine young lord had only answered the truth.  Whether it was from that sudden struggle of pride, and his hard-hearted resolution not to remember the Counsellor who had befriended him formerly or whether the labor of many years had caused it, from that evening, from that moment, the memory of the Emperor’s great Minister began to decay.  The ambitious designs of the shepherd boy of twenty years ago came back to him; but of all that had befallen him since, John Durer remembered nothing.  The hour of requital was begun!

VI.

Thanks to his good courser, Baron Durer, the Minister, got home in safety to his chateau.  The first person that he met was the baroness.  He turned abruptly away from her.

“Whither are you hurrying so fast, my dear baron?” said she, seeing her husband running away from her, which was not his custom, for he was fond of his wife.

“Baron!” was his reply; “to what baron were you calling?  I am no baron, madame—­though one day, perhaps, I may be.  Let us hope I may.”

The tone in which he spoke these words terrified the baroness.  Her husband immediately afterward left the chateau, and began running as fast as his legs could carry him, neither stopping nor slackening his pace.  His head was bent down, like the head of a miser who is seeking about everywhere for the treasure which some one has stolen from him.  From that day forward his face assumed a gloomy expression, his color became sallow, his eye haggard; and he began bitterly to complain that heaven had thought fit to send him on earth in a shepherd’s form and a shepherd’s dress.