TWO ROYAL FOES
CHAPTER I
THE MIGHTY FOE
One afternoon, a hundred and one years ago, old Hans took little Bettina to visit her godmother, Frau Schmidt, who lived in a red-roofed house not far from the old church of St. Michael's in Jena.
Bettina loved to go to Frau Schmidt's. First, there was Wilhelm, her godmother's son, who was so good to her, and cut her toys out of wood, and told her all kinds of fine stories. And then there were the soldiers. They were everywhere, standing in groups about the Market, marching in companies, or clattering on horses through the never quiet streets.
The way from Bettina's home to Jena led through a deep, still, green forest, and as she and her grandfather strolled along that October afternoon the little girl begged him for a story.
"Ja, ja, my Bettina," and the old man gave her a smile, "there is old Frederick Barbarossa."
Then, with a "Once upon a time," he told her how, in a cave in their own Thuringian Wood in the Kyffhäuser Mountain, an old emperor of Germany had slept for hundreds and hundreds of years, his head on his elbows, which rested on a great stone table in the middle of the cavern.
"And his beard, child, has grown down to the floor, and it is red as a flame, and his hair—it is red, too, quite blazing, child, they say—wraps about him like a veil. And before the cave and around it—you can see them yourself, little one, if you go there—are ravens, cawing and cawing and flying ever in circles."