d amused the company by playing the bagpipe on a black cat.
He wore blue and red striped stockings, had a red beard, and a pointed
hat adorned with colored ribbons and cock's feathers. As he looked with
his fiery eye on the interloper, the latter called out in his fright:
'Oh thou holy and blessed Trinity.' The earth immediately gave a shock,
so that the man fell down stunned and then only became aware that he
was sitting close to a dead white horse and the bones of the hanged.
The field-fare now crept about the ditch in the shape of toads, and the
company disappeared in the bushes weeping and sobbing. From that place
to the valley of the Seven Mills nothing more occurred, except that he
met three hares, one of which had a body like that of a goat. Rendered
more courageous the man called out to them: 'Stop thou sorceress in the
name of the triune God.' On that they turned into three black ravens
and flew away towards the Heiligenberg. Since then the Devil gets out
of Maier's path like a whipped cur as he himself told me."

The Magistrate learned in humanity stopped talking and wiped the
perspiration from his brow after this poetic harangue. At first the
Kurfuerst had looked astonished, then doubtful, and finally listened
with scarcely concealed disgust. He now said deliberately: "If anything
takes place in the least resembling what you have described, it is,
because you permit so many lewd fellows to gather here, who are a
torment to all honest people, jugglers, magicians, peddlars with
pictures, quacks, spirit-conjurors, exorcists, and other vagrants who
travel backwards and forwards between the Bishoprics on the Main and
Rhine, a loose lot, who if they are not in league with the devil, are
not very far from it."

"Vagrants would not mask or veil themselves. Most Gracious Sir,"
answered the Magistrate with a wise look.

"Well and why should Erastus' daughter have been one of those masks?"

"Your Highness knows of the note, by which, as her father maintains,
Master Laurenzano makes an appointment with her on the Holtermann."

"Ah yes; and how does that scoundrelly Priest explain his invitation?"

The confused Magistrate cleared his throat: "I own that I have not as
yet questioned him on the matter."

"How," roared the Prince. "You have not examined the chief witness? And
in the meantime you destroy the character of an innocent maiden simply
on the testimony of an old quean and of rascally scoundrels? You are
inde