ind and gentle to
all. But the hatred felt by all the village against the manor-house
farmer was transferred to his children.

For eighteen years the manor-house farmer carried on a lawsuit with
the village commune. He claimed the seignorial rights of the estate. He
had fifty votes in the election of the squire; and he drew the
smoking-tithe, the chicken-tithe, the road-tithe, and a hundred other
perquisites, which the farmers never paid without the greatest chagrin,
grumbling, and quarrelling. Such is human nature! A count or a baron
would have received all these taxes without much difficulty; but the
farmer had to swallow a curse with every grain which was yielded by his
fellows. For want of a better revenge, they mowed down the manor-house
farmer's rye-fields at night while the corn was yet green. But this
only made matters worse, for the manor-house farmer recovered his
damages from the commune; and he employed a gamekeeper of his own, half
of whose salary the villagers were bound to pay. So there was no end to
petty disagreements.

A new lawyer having settled in the little town of Sulz, a lawsuit began
between the manor-house farmer and the commune, in which paper enough
was used up to cover acres of ground. Like a great portion of the Black
Forest, the village then belonged to Austria. The "Landoogt" sat at
Rottemburg, the court of appeals at Friburg in the Breisgau: an
important case could be carried still further. In the complicated state
of the higher tribunals, it was easy to keep a suit in a proper state
of confusion to the day of judgment.

The quarrel between the manor-house farmer and the villagers grew in
time into a standing feud between Baisingen and Nordstetten. When they
met at markets or in towns, the Baisingers called the Nordstetters
their subjects or copyholders, because a Baisingen man ruled over them.
The Nordstetters, who went by the nickname of Peaky-mouths, never
failed to retort. One sally provoked another: the badinage remained
friendly for a time, but grew more and more bitter, and, before any one
expected it, there was a declared state of war, and cudgellings were
heard of on all sides. The first occurred at the Ergenzingen fair; and
after that the two parties rarely met without a skirmish. They would
travel for hours to a dance or a wedding, drink and dance quietly
together for a while, and finally break into the real object of their
visit,--the general shindy.

The manor-house farm