“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.”

“Come, then,” answered the Nuremberg youth, but continued thoughtfully:  “Yet my master’s grandmother, a woman of eighty, is probably older than the one up there, but nobody could imagine a kinder, pleasanter dame.  When she looks approvingly at one it seems as if the dear God’s blessing were shining from two little windows.”

“That’s just like my grandmother at home!” exclaimed the Weissenburg apprentice with sparkling eyes.

Turning from the Eysvogel mansion as they spoke, they pursued their way.

Siebenburg had overtaken the apprentices, but ere crossing the threshold of the house which was now his home he stopped before it.

It might, perhaps, be called the largest and handsomest in Nuremberg; but it was only a wide two-story structure, though the roof had been adorned with battlements and the sides with a small bow-windowed turret.  At the second story a bracket, bearing an image of the Madonna, had been built out on one side, and on the other the bow window from which old Countess Rotterbach had looked down into the street.

The coat of arms was very striking and wholly out of harmony with the simplicity of the rest of the building.  Its showy splendour, visible for a long distance, occupied the wide space between the door of the house and the windows of the upper story.  The escutcheon of the noble family from which Rosalinde, Herr Casper’s wife, had descended rested against the shield bearing the birds.  The Rotterbach supporters, a nude man and a bear standing on its hind legs, rose on both sides of the double escutcheon, and the stone cutter had surmounted the Eysvogel helmet with a count’s coronet.