The gypsy woman with her child stepped up and was vociferously greeted by the rope-dancers.
Mr. Schmenckel shook hands with her, and patted the Czika paternally on her brown cheeks.
"That's right, Xenobia! here you are, back again!" he said. "By the great dickens, we could not get on at all without you. Good-by, professor! Thanks for the escort! You must turn back here, or you won't find the way to Fichtenau."
"I'll go a little further with you," replied the man in the blouse.
"All right!" said Mr. Schmenckel; "the further the better. Such a good old brick, like yourself, we do not meet with every day. Is all right in there? Well, go on then!"
The wagon was set in motion. After a few minutes the whole procession--wagon, horses, and men, had been swallowed up by the thick gray fog.
CHAPTER XII.
The town of Grunwald played, in days previous to those to which this story belongs, a far more important part than now. It had been an honored member of the great Hanse League, and rivalled Hamburg, Bremen, and Lubeck in wealth and power. Its ships sailed on all the northern seas, and the Grunwald flag was well known even in the ports of Genoa and Venice. The citizens were a broad-shouldered, hard-headed race, strong in their love and their hatred, and thorough in all their ways. They were justly proud of their liberties and their privileges, and trusted implicitly in their secure position, amid the ocean and bottomless swamps, and the high walls and ramparts of the city, but more fully yet in the sword by their side and the brave heart in their bosom. Even in the Thirty Years' War, Grunwald still proved its ancient reputation in fierce battle against the Imperialists, and the recollection of the glorious deeds of their forefathers survives to this day in the hearts of the present inhabitants.
They must unfortunately fall back upon past glory, for modern times have done little for them in this respect. The long and tortuous canals in the great bay on which the town is situated admit only of small vessels of light draught, and navigation nowadays cannot well get along with such ships; trade has, besides, sought other roads and found other markets, and Grunwald has slowly but steadily sunk from its proud eminence, till it has fallen at last to the level of a small provincial town of no account in the great world, as far as political influence and commercial importance are concerned.
The harbor is filled up now, the ramparts are razed, and the once enormous walls exist only in fragments, and yet there is a melancholy sheen of former greatness about the old Hanse town which attracts the thoughtful traveller, as the mouldy smell of an old parchment charms the book-worm. In spite of all the efforts made by the last generations to give the town a sober, trivial appearance, they have after all not been able to straighten all the crooked narrow streets, and to destroy all the poetry of many an old house, with its narrow, lofty, and richly-adorned gable-end. And above the labyrinth of streets, lanes, and courts, with their half-modern, half-mediæval character, there tower still the steeples of glorious churches, which are far too grand for the reduced proportions of Grunwald. But at night, when they cast their gigantic shadows far over the town which sleeps beneath them in the pale moonlight, or in the evening as you approach the harbor from the open sea, and gray mists rising from the water spread over the whole a mysterious veil, the illusion is yet strong, and the effect full of grandeur.