"Sturm und Gewitter!" swore the luckless grenadier in great wrath; "do you mean to say, Herr Colonel, that I am to marry this old bag of bones—this very shrivling?"
"My poor Vogelwiede, it is marry, or march to Spandau."
"Ach Gott, what an old vampire it is!" said Vogelwiede, shuddering.
"I am utterly bewildered, comrade," said my father.
"In mercy to me, Herr Colonel, tell me what I have done that I am to be punished thus?"
"I can't say, my poor fellow, that I understand the affair in any way; but we all know our father Frederick, and that the dose, however nauseous, must be swallowed. You must either be chained to her, or to a thirty-six pound shot in Spandau—a companion you will not get rid of, even by day."
"Der teufel! der teufel!" groaned the grenadier, who was actually perspiring with the idea of the whole affair, while the old woman, with her grey hairs, yellow fangs, and grimy wrinkles, grinned like some gnome sent by the Ruberzahl, or a witch from the Blocksberg; and to him it seemed as the sentence of death when my father said,—
"Send for the chaplain of the brigade, and desire him to bring his prayer-book and surplice."
"Oh, Colonel, remember Cunnersdorf, and how when a boy I held Velt-marshal Keith dying in my arms at Hochkirchen—I was his favourite orderly," urged poor Vogelwiede, melted almost to tears; but it was espouse or Spandau, and he was married in the military chapel, to his own intense misery, to the utter bewilderment of his comrades, who knew not what to make of the affair, and to the exulting joy of the hideous old crone.
Six months after, Frederick returned from the reviews at Halle to Berlin, and desired my father to bring before him the couple who had been married by his orders.