As she signed the writ, she found a bill appendixed for her fare during the time of her custody. She returned the leaf with a courteous smile to the town-scribent, and as the rabble was knocking at the door he plucked the interesting supplement into bits as fast as possible, and strewed the pieces under the table.
Meanwhile the chains had been removed from Jörg; he looked about him as in a dream. Dame Hollin took his hand, and went to the door with him, where both were received by the gratified shouts of the shuffling crowd.
The old woman kept her word. In her house Jörg became an honest, valiant man, who in the Thirty Years’ War did great service to Ulm, the town of his adoption, and his name was never spoken but in honour and gratitude. But the witch’s counsel was forced to resign office, and after those five years of terror followed a better decade, during which law and justice reigned once more in the old Reichstadt.
W. H. Riehl.
ELECTIVE AFFINITIES.
I.
Highly-esteemed Madam,—I venture to write these lines to you in the firm belief that you, like all women of mental distinction, love the unusual, and hate to the utmost the commonplaces of ordinary conventionality....
Having left the company, and wending my lonely way through the streets of Berlin, I felt myself to be in a state of lively excitement. The events of the evening passed once more before me, and ere long I was in that incomprehensible mystical mood, which comes so suddenly we know not how or whence. I was quite capable of calling to the spirits that seemed to float about me: “Answer me, if ye hear me!” when the sound of a passing carriage called me back to reality, and my gaze turned from the stars of heaven to a pair of star-like earthly orbs whose mild light shone for a passing moment with full radiance into my soul.
These starry eyes belonged to a young lady who was seated by your side in the carriage. At that moment I was seized with the purpose I am now carrying out.