He asks Caspar if he has more bullets like the one just spent.  No; that was the hunter’s last; but more might be obtained, provided the effort be made that very night.  The moment was propitious.  It was the second of three days in which the sun was in the constellation of the Archer; at midnight there would occur an eclipse of the moon.  What a fortunate coincidence that all the omens should be fair at so momentous a juncture of Max’s affairs!  The fear of losing his bride overcomes Max’s scruples; he agrees to meet the tempter in the Wolf’s Glen, a spot of evil repute, at midnight, and at least witness the casting of more of the charmed bullets.

At the moment when Max’s shot brought down the eagle, a portrait of the original Cuno fell from the wall of the cottage occupied by his descendant; and when the second act begins, we see Aennchen, a cousin of Agathe’s, putting it back in its place.  Aennchen is inclined to be playful and roguish, and serves as a pretty foil to the sentimental Agathe.  She playfully scolds the nail which she is hammering into the wall again for so rudely dropping the old ranger to the floor, and seeks to dispel the melancholy which has obsessed her cousin by singing songs about the bad companionship of the blues and the humors of courtship.  She succeeds, in a measure, and Agathe confesses that she had felt a premonition of danger ever since a pious Hermit, to whom she had gone for counsel in the course of the day, had warned her of the imminency of a calamity which he could not describe.  The prediction seemed to have been fulfilled in the falling of the picture, which had slightly hurt her, but might easily have killed her.  Aennchen urges her to go to bed, but she refuses, saying she shall not retire for sleep until Max has come.  Agathe sings the scena which has clung to our concert-rooms as persistently as the overture.  The slow portion of the aria ("Leise, leise, fromme Weise"), like the horn music at the beginning of the overture, has found its way into the Protestant hymn-books of England and America, and its Allegro furnishes forth the jubilant music of the instrumental introduction to the opera.  Berlioz in his book “A Travers Chants” writes in a fine burst of enthusiasm of this scena:  “It is impossible for any listener to fail to hear the sighs of the orchestra during the prayer of the virtuous maiden who awaits the coming of her affianced lover; or the strange hum in which the alert ear imagines it hears the rustling of the tree-tops.  It even seems as if the darkness grew deeper and colder at that magical modulation to C major.  What a sympathetic shudder comes over one at the cry:  ’’Tis he! ‘tis he!’ No, no.  It must be confessed, there is no other aria as beautiful as this.  No master, whether German, Italian, or French, was ever able to delineate, as is done here in a single scene, holy prayer, melancholy, disquiet, pensiveness, the slumber of nature, the mysterious harmony of the starry skies,