wait stolidly until morning should come and
prove the truth of their fears and warnings.

In the mean time the ghost hunters built a huge fire, lighted their
many candles, and sat down to await developments. Rupert afterwards told
my uncle that they really felt no fear whatever, only a contemptuous
curiosity, and they ate their supper with good appetite and an unusual
relish. It was a long evening. They played many games of chess, waiting
for midnight. Hour passed after hour, and nothing occurred to interrupt
the monotony of the evening. Ten, eleven, came and went,--it was almost
midnight. They piled more wood in the fireplace, lighted new candles,
looked to their pistols--and waited. The clocks in the village struck
twelve; the sound coming muffled through the high, deep-embrasured
windows. Nothing happened, nothing to break the heavy silence; and with
a feeling of disappointed relief they looked at each other and
acknowledged that they had met another rebuff.

Finally they decided that there was no use in sitting up and boring
themselves any longer, they had much better rest; so Otto threw himself
down on the mattress, falling almost immediately asleep. Rupert sat a
little longer, smoking, and watching the stars creep along behind the
shattered glass and the bent leads of the lofty windows; watching the
fire fall together, and the strange shadows move mysteriously on the
mouldering walls. The iron hook in the oak beam, that crossed the
ceiling midway, fascinated him, not with fear, but morbidly. So, it was
from that hook that for twelve years, twelve long years of changing
summer and winter, the body of Count Albert, murderer and suicide, hung
in its strange casing of mediaeval steel; moving a little at first, and
turning gently while the fire died out on the hearth, while the ruins of
the castle grew cold, and horrified peasants sought for the bodies of
the score of gay, reckless, wicked guests whom Count Albert had gathered
in Kropfsberg for a last debauch, gathered to their terrible and
untimely death. What a strange and fiendish idea it was, the young,
handsome noble who had ruined himself and his family in the society of
the splendid debauchees, gathering them all together, men and women who
had known only love and pleasure, for a glorious and awful riot of
luxury, and then, when they were all dancing in the great ballroom,
locking the doors and burning the whole castle about them, the while he
sat in the great