CHAPTER X.
An alarm, as if the world were sinking, was now raised in Munster. The bells rung, the drums beat, and the armed masses ran together, filling the air with their wild shouts. Alf and Hanslein mounted the wall over the gate and looked down upon the city, in the streets of which torches were every where blazing. From the market before St. Lambert's church the light of an immense fire arose to the heavens, and the sounds of a horrible shouting and screaming as from many thousands came thence over the city.
'This is a dreadful night,' said Alf, leaning sadly upon his sword.
'If I should say,' observed Hanslein, 'that the appearance of the city was particularly pleasing to me, I should tell a falsehood. Were it not for my unlucky affair with the serjeant, I would have gone to the episcopalian camp with the field officer, in God's name.'
Finally, a certain degree of order seemed to prevail in the chaos about the market place, although like every thing there, it was of a horrible nature. To a short, ferocious yell of the populace succeeded a profound and terrible pause--then cracked a volley of musketry, and then again another pause--and so alternately screams, pauses and reports of fire-arms, until Hanslein had counted twenty volleys.
'What can that musketry mean?' asked Alf in an undertone, with some misgivings as to the nature of the proceedings.
'Master Johannes may just now be undertaking to sift his flock,' said Hanslein.
'Must it then be,' exclaimed Alf with bitter grief, 'that by every revolution, although intended to promote the welfare of the whole people, men must be placed at the head who have no hearts in their bodies, and who rule by destroying the lives of their brethren!'
'It appears so, answered Hanslein; 'Whoever is placed at the head by popular commotions, must himself be a bold demagogue who has no property, character or conscience to lose. To leap over every obstacle and ward off every danger by the destruction of a dozen or two of his fellow men, is nothing at all to him. People like you, my brother, would make right good leaders, for which nothing is really requisite but vigor, honesty and sound sense; but honest people draw back from such opportunities from a want of self confidence, and thereby give the devils free scope to do evil, which is very wrong!'
Alf, reminded by this conversation of Tuiskoshirer's rejected crown, and of old Fabricius's prophecy, at last sorrowfully exclaimed, 'in an unhappy hour came I home, to my native city!' and proceeded to join the guard.