of the
manuscript, which Archivarius Lindhorst had as usual spread out before
him. But on the parchment roll he perceived so many strange crabbed
strokes and twirls all twisted together in inexplicable confusion,
offering no resting-point for the eye, that it seemed to him well-nigh
impossible to copy all this exactly. Nay, in glancing over the whole,
you might have thought the parchment was nothing but a piece of
thickly veined marble, or a stone sprinkled over with lichens.
Nevertheless he determined to do his utmost, and boldly dipped in
his pen; but the ink would not run, do what he would; impatiently
he spirted the point of his pen against his nail, and--Heaven and
Earth!--a huge blot fell on the out-spread original! Hissing and
foaming, a blue flash rose from the blot, and, crackling and wavering,
shot through the room to the ceiling. Then a thick vapor rolled from
the walls; the leaves began to rustle, as if shaken by a tempest; and
down out of them darted glaring basilisks in sparkling fire; these
kindled the vapor, and the bickering masses of flame rolled round
Anselmus. The golden trunks of the palm-trees became gigantic snakes,
which knocked their frightful heads together with piercing metallic
clang and wound their scaly bodies round Anselmus.

"Madman I suffer now the punishment of what, in insolent sacrilege,
thou hast done!" So cried the frightful voice of the crowned
Salamander, who appeared above the snakes like a glittering beam in
the midst of the flame; and now the yawning jaws of the snakes poured
forth cataracts of fire on Anselmus; and it was as if the fire-streams
were congealing about his body and changing into a firm ice-cold
mass. But while Anselmus' limbs, more and more pressed together and
contracted, stiffened into powerlessness, his senses passed away.
On returning to himself, he could not stir a joint; he was as if
surrounded with a glistening brightness, on which he struck if he but
tried to lift his hand or move otherwise.--Alas! He was sitting in a
well-corked crystal bottle, on a shelf, in the library of Archivarius
Lindhorst.

TENTH VIGIL

Sorrows of the student Anselmus in the Glass Bottle. Happy Life of
the Cross Church Scholars and Law Clerks. The Battle in the Library
of Archivarius Lindhorst. Victory of the Salamander, and Deliverance
of the student Anselmus.

Justly may I doubt whether thou, kind reader, wert ever sealed up in
a glass bottle; or ev