But other and not less stern trials were soon to follow those already past; for throughout man's life one obstacle is overcome only to make way for another. The world is like a stormy sea: wave follows wave, from age to age, in a flow that eternity alone may stay.
Chapter XVIII.
During the entire battle, until nightfall, the people of Grandfontaine saw the fool, Yegof, standing on the summit of Little Donon, his crown upon his head, his sceptre waving in his hand. There he stood, like a Merovingian king, issuing his orders to his imaginary armies. What feelings shook him as he saw the Germans beaten back, routed, no man may say. At the last echo of the cannon he disappeared. Whither had he gone? This is what the people of Tiefenbach say:
At the time of which I speak, two strange beings—sisters—lived on the Bocksberg. One was called Little Kateline; the other Tall Berbel. These two ragged creatures made their home in the cavern of Luitprand, so named, as old chronicles aver, from the fact that the King of the Germani, before descending into Alsace, buried beneath its immense vault of red stone the barbarian chiefs who had fallen at Blutfeld. The hot spring, which always bubbles and streams from the middle of the cave, secured the sisters from the fierce cold of mountain winters, and Daniel Horn, of Tiefenbach, the wood-cutter, had the charity to close the main entrance from without with great heaps of broom and brushwood. At the side of the hot spring was another spring, cold as ice and clear as crystal.
Kateline always drank at this spring, and was not more than four feet in height; but what she lacked in length she made up in rotund breadth; and her wondering look, round eyes, and enormous throat, gave her the appearance of a meditative matronly hen. Every Sunday she bore an osier basket to the village of Tiefenbach, and the good people there filled it with cooked potatoes, loaves of bread, and sometimes, on holidays, with cakes and other remnants of their festivities. Then the poor creature would make her way back to the cave, breathless, laughing, chattering, rejoicing.
But Tall Berbel was ever careful not to drink at the cold spring. She was bony, fleshless as a bat, and had lost an eye; her nose was flat, her ears large, and her single orb sparkled like a coal; she lived upon the fruits of her sister's sallies. She never left Bocksberg. But in July, when the heat was greatest, standing upon the height, she shook a withered thistle over the grain of those who had not regularly filled Kateline's basket; and fearful tempests, or hail, or swarms of rats or field-mice, ruined the budding harvest. The spells of Berbel were feared like pestilence; she was everywhere known as the Wetterhexe, or storm-witch, while little Kateline was esteemed the good fairy of Tiefenbach. In this way Berbel lived in idleness, and Kateline begged food for both.
Unfortunately for the two sisters, Yegof had for some years previously established his winter residence in the cavern of Luitprand. Thence he departed in the spring, to visit his numberless castles and to count his feudatories, as far as Geierstein in the Hundsruck. Every year, toward the end of November, after the first snows, he arrived with his raven—an event which the storm-witch always bitterly bemoaned.
"Again thy plaints," he was wont to say, as he tranquilly installed himself in the most comfortable spot the cave afforded; "do you not both live upon my domains? I am very good to suffer two valkyrs [Footnote 271] useless in the Valhalla of my fathers, to remain here."
[Footnote 271: Maidens of Odin, whom he sends to every battlefield to decide who shall fall and who shall be victorious. They also wait upon the heroes in Valhalla.]