to us maidens, and said
"Grant me a few words apart from the matter you see, in time a man gets
an eye for a falcon, and sees what its good points are, and if it ails
aught. He learns to know the breed by its feathers, and breastbone, and
the color of its legs, and many another sign, and its temper by its eye
and beak;--and it is the same with knowing of men. All this I learned
not of myself, but from my father, God rest him; and like as you may
know a falcon by the beak, so you may know a man or a woman by the
mouth. And as I mind me of Mistress Ursula's face, as I saw it then,
that is enough for me. Aye, and I will give my best Iceland Gerfalcon
for a lame crow if every word she spoke concerning the death of Junker
Herdegen was not false knavery. She is a goodly woman and of wondrous
beauty; yet, as I sat erewhile, thinking and gazing into the Wurzburg
wine in my cup, I remembered her red lips and white teeth, as she bid me
exhort his kin at home to seek the lost man no more. And I will plainly
declare what that mouth brought to my mind; nought else than the muzzle
of the she-wolf you caught and chained up. That was how she showed her
tusks when Uhlwurm wheedled her after his wise, and she feigned to be
his friend albeit she thirsted to take him by the throat.--False, I say,
false, false was every word that came to my ears out of that mouth! I
know what I know; she is mad for the sake of one of the Schoppers, and
if it be not Kunz then it is the other, and if it be not with love then
it is with hate. Make the sign of the cross, say I; she would put one
or both of them out of the world, as like as not. For certain it is that
she would fain have had me believe that the elder Junker Schopper had
already come to a bad end, and it is no less certain that she had some
foul purpose in hand."

The old man coughed, wiped his brow, and fell back in his seat; we,
indeed, knew not what to think of his discourse, and looked one at the
other with enquiry. Jung Kubbeling was the last man on earth we could
have weened would read hearts. Only Uncle Christian upheld him, and
declared that the future would ere long confirm all that wise old
Jordan's son had foretold from sure signs.

The dispute waxed so loud that even our silent Chaplain put in his word,
to express his consent to the Brunswicker's opinion of Ursula, and to
put forward fresh proofs why, in spite of her statement, Herdegen might
yet be in the land of the living.

At