I was born without teeth—­and there Richard III had the advantage of me; but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the advantage of him.  My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest.

But now a thought occurs to me.  My own history would really seem so tame contrasted with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom to leave it unwritten until I am hanged.  If some other biographies I have read had stopped with the ancestry until a like event occurred, it would have been a felicitous thing, for the reading public.  How does it strike you?

Awful, Terrible
medieval romance

CHAPTER I

The secret revealed.

It was night.  Stillness reigned in the grand old feudal castle of Klugenstein.  The year 1222 was drawing to a close.  Far away up in the tallest of the castle’s towers a single light glimmered.  A secret council was being held there.  The stern old lord of Klugenstein sat in a chair of state meditating.  Presently he, said, with a tender accent: 

“My daughter!”

A young man of noble presence, clad from head to heel in knightly mail, answered: 

“Speak, father!”

“My daughter, the time is come for the revealing of the mystery that hath puzzled all your young life.  Know, then, that it had its birth in the matters which I shall now unfold.  My brother Ulrich is the great Duke of Brandenburgh.  Our father, on his deathbed, decreed that if no son were born to Ulrich, the succession should pass to my house, provided a son were born to me.  And further, in case no son, were born to either, but only daughters, then the succession should pass to Ulrich’s daughter, if she proved stainless; if she did not, my daughter should succeed, if she retained a blameless name.  And so I, and my old wife here, prayed fervently for the good boon of a son, but the prayer was vain.  You were born to us.  I was in despair.  I saw the mighty prize slipping from my grasp, the splendid dream vanishing away.  And I had been so hopeful!  Five years had Ulrich lived in wedlock, and yet his wife had borne no heir of either sex.

“‘But hold,’ I said, ‘all is not lost.’  A saving scheme had shot athwart my brain.  You were born at midnight.  Only the leech, the nurse, and six waiting-women knew your sex.  I hanged them every one before an hour had sped.  Next morning all the barony went mad with rejoicing over the proclamation that a son was born to Klugenstein, an heir to mighty Brandenburgh!  And well the secret has been kept.  Your mother’s own sister nursed your infancy, and from that time forward we feared nothing.

“When you were ten years old, a daughter was born to Ulrich.  We grieved, but hoped for good results from measles, or physicians, or other natural enemies of infancy, but were always disappointed.  She lived, she throve —­Heaven’s malison upon her!  But it is nothing.  We are safe.  For, Ha-ha! have we not a son?  And is not our son the future Duke?  Our well-beloved Conrad, is it not so?—­for, woman of eight-and-twenty years —­as you are, my child, none other name than that hath ever fallen to you!