The gigantic figure of Sir Seitz Siebenburg moved with drooping head through the budding joy of this June day towards the Eysvogel dwelling.

His gloomy, haggard face and disordered attire made two neatly dressed young shoemaker’s apprentices, on their way to their work, nudge each other and look keenly at him.

“I’d rather meet him here in broad daylight among houses and people than in the dusk on the highway,” remarked one of them.

“There’s no danger,” replied the other.  “He wears the curb now.  He moved from the robber nest into the rich Eysvogel house opposite.  That’s Herr Casper’s son-in-law.  But such people can never let other folks’ property alone.  Only here they work in another way.  The shoes he wears were made in our workshop, but the master still whistles for his pay, and he owes everybody—­the tailor, the lacemaker, the armourer, the girdlemaker, and the goldsmith.  If an apprentice reminds him of the debt, let him beware of bruises.”

“The Emperor Rudolph ought to issue an edict against such injustice!” wrathfully exclaimed the other and taller youth, the handsome son of a master of the craft from Weissenburg on the Sand, who expected soon to take his father’s place.  “Up at Castle Graufels, which is saddled on our little town, master and man would be going barefoot but for us; yet for three years we haven’t seen so much as a penny of his, though my father says times have already improved, since the Hapsburg, as a just man——­”

“Things have not been so bad here for a long while, the saints be praised!” his companion broke in.  “Siebenburg, or some of his wife’s rich kindred, will at last be compelled to settle matters.  We have the law and the Honourable Council to attend to that.  Look up!  Yonder stately old house gave its daughter to the penniless knight.  She is one of our customers too; a handsome woman, and not one of the worst either.  But her mother, who was born a countess—­if the shoe doesn’t make a foot small which Nature created big, there’s such an outcry!  True, the old woman, her mother, is worse still; she scolds and screams.  But look up at the bow window.  There she stands.  I’m only a poor brewer’s son, but before I——­”

“You don’t say so!” the other interrupted.  Have you seen the owl in the cage in front of the guardhouse at the gate of the hospital?  It is her living image; and how her chin projects and moves up and down, as though she were chewing leather!”

“And yet,” said the other, as if insisting upon something difficult to believe, “and yet the old woman is a real countess.”

The Weissenburg apprentice expressed his astonishment with another:  “You don’t say so!” but as he spoke he grasped his companion’s arm, adding earnestly:  “Let us go.  That ugly old woman just looked at me, and if it wasn’t the evil eye I shall go straight to the church and drive away the misfortune with holy water.”