The widow swore revenge, and consoled the weeping Trude, begging her only to wait till Walpurgisnacht[[1]] and her perfidious lover should be punished.
[[1]] Night before the first of May, when all evil spirits and witches, according to the legend, meet on the Brocken. See Goethe's "Faust."
She made a league with the evil spirits of the mountains and the air, and devoted herself to the unholy arts of a witch.
Walpurgisnacht arrived, the widow stood on the balcony of her house and invoked the demons and witches, who swept through the night, which rested black as destruction on the mountains, heavy as the day of wrath and vengeance.
From the Brocken broke a terrible tempest. Awful thunders rolled, lightnings in fiery serpents cut their way through the heavens and mountains, and a tremendous flood swept down from the Brocken, destroying all in its course.
The coalers clung to the rocky walls, but Princess Ilse looked calmly on the wild scene, saw the rocks rent on which her father's castle stood, and it, her lover, father, and servants all swept away; and as she too was about to perish, a tall manly form, with majestic head and black locks—probably the Fairy King—seized her in his strong arms, wrapped her in a white mantle, and vanished.
Poor Trude, from the balcony by her mother's side, saw her faithless Ralf carried down the torrent, threw herself over after him, and when the flood had subsided the widow found them in each other's arms, washed up on the banks of the river.
The Wild Huntsman.
Earl Eberhard von Wurtemberg rode one day alone into the forest to amuse himself with the chase. Suddenly he heard a loud roar and noise, as of a hunter riding furiously past; he was terrified, dismounted in haste from his horse, and approaching a tree, as if for defence, cried aloud to the imagined huntsman, asking if he intended violence.