I am here not at all fanciful.  Some thirty years ago I came across a pamphlet published by Dr. J. G. Th.  Grasse, a Saxon Court Councillor, in which he traced the origin of the story at the base of “Der Freischutz” to a confession made in open court in a Bohemian town in 1710.  Grasse found the story in a book entitled “Monathliche Unterredungen aus dem Reich der Geister,” published in Leipsic in 1730, the author of which stated that he had drawn the following statement of facts from judicial records:  In 1710 in a town in Bohemia, George Schmid, a clerk, eighteen years old, who was a passionate lover of target-shooting, was persuaded by a hunter to join in an enterprise for moulding charmed bullets on July 30, the same being St. Abdon’s Day.  The hunter promised to aid the young man in casting sixty-three bullets, of which sixty were to hit infallibly and three to miss just as certainly.  The two men provided themselves with coals, moulds, etc., and betook themselves at nightfall to a cross-roads.  There the hunter drew a circle with his knife and placed mysterious characters, the meaning of which his companion did not know, around the edge.  This done, he told the clerk to step within the ring, take off his clothing, and make denial of God and the Holy Trinity.  The bullets, said the hunter, must all be cast between eleven o’clock and midnight, or the clerk would fall into the clutches of the devil.  At eleven o’clock the dead coals began to glow of their own accord, and the two men began the moulding, although all manner of ghostly apparitions tried to hinder them.  At last there came a horseman in black, who demanded the bullets which had been cast.  The hunter refused to yield them up, and in revenge the horseman threw something into the fire which sent out so noisome an odor that the two venturesome men fell half dead within the circle.  The hunter escaped, and, as it turned out subsequently, betook himself to the Salzkammergut, near Salzburg; but the clerk was found lying at the crossroads and carried into town.  There he made a complete confession in court, and because he had had intercourse with the Evil One, doubtless, was condemned to be burned to death.  In consideration of his youth, however, the sentence was commuted to imprisonment at hard labor for six years.

In the legend of the Wild Huntsman, who under the name of Samiel purchases the souls of men with his magic bullets, the folklorist and student of the evolution of religions sees one of many evidences of ancient mythology perverted to bring it into the service of Christianity.  Originally the Wild Huntsman was Odin (or Wotan).  The missionaries to the Germans, finding it difficult to root out belief in the ancient deities, gave their attributes to saints in a few cases, but for the greater part transformed them into creatures of evil.  It was thus that Frau Holle (or Holda) became a wicked Venus, as we shall see in the next chapter.  The little spotted beetle which English and American children call ladybug or lady-bird (that is, the bug or bird of our Lady), the Germans Marienkaferchen, and the French La bete du bon Dieu, was sacred to Holda; and though the name of the Virgin Mary was bestowed upon it in the long ago, it still remains a love oracle, as the little ones know who bid it—­