while she lived, they became far
worse when she died. At eleven o'clock every night she now thrust her
head through a hole in the convent tower and tooted most miserably,
and every morning at about four o'clock she joined unasked in the
matin song.

"For a few days the sisterhood endured this with a beating heart, and
on bended knees; but on the fourth morning, when she joined in the
service, and one of the nuns whispered tremblingly to her neighbour--

"'Ha! it is surely our Tut-Osel!' the song ceased, the hair of the
nuns stood on end, and they all rushed from the church, exclaiming--

"'Ha! Tut-Osel! Tut-Osel!'

"Despite the penances and chastisements with which they were
threatened, not one of the nuns would enter the church again until the
Tut-Osel was banished from the walls of the nunnery. To effect this,
one of the most celebrated exorcists of the day, a Capuchin friar,
from a cloister on the banks of the Danube, was sent for; and he
succeeded, by prayer and fasting, in banishing Ursel in the shape of a
screech-owl to the far-distant Dummburg.

"Here she met Hackelnberg, the Wild Huntsman, and found in his
wood-cry, 'Hu! hu!' as great delight as he did in her 'U! hu!' So they
now always hunt together; he glad to have a spirit after his own kind,
and she rejoiced in the extreme to be no longer compelled to reside
within the walls of a cloister, and there listen to the echo of her
own song."

"So much for the Tut-Osel. Now tell us how it fared with the shepherd
who spoke to Hackelnberg."

"Listen to the marvellous adventure," said the third wanderer. "A
shepherd once hearing the Wild Huntsman journeying through the forest,
encouraged the spirit hounds, and called out--

"'Good sport to you, Hackelnberg.'

"Hackelnberg instantly turned round and roared out to him, in a voice
like thunder--

"'Since you have helped me to set on the hounds, you shall have part
of the spoil.'

"The trembling shepherd tried to hide himself, but Hackelnberg hurled
the half-consumed haunch of a horse into the shepherd's cart with such
violence that it could scarcely be removed."

THE ALRAUN.

It is a well-known tradition near Magdeburg, that when a man who is a
thief by inheritance,--that is to say, whose father and grandfather
and great-grandfather before him, three generations of his family,
have been thieves; or whose mother has committed a theft, or been
possessed with an intense longing to steal something a