The thin man leaned back on his chair, grasped the handle of his sword with his long fingers, stretched out his legs a yard further, and said, with an air of triumph, "Yes, yes, my friends, it looks very bad there; the surrounding places in the neighbourhood have suffered; all the fruit trees have been cut down, the town and castle furiously bombarded, the former having already surrendered. Forty knights, indeed, still defend the castle; but they cannot hold out their tottering walls much longer!"
"What tottering walls do you talk of?" cried the fat man; "whoever has seen the castle of Tübingen, must not talk of tottering walls. Are there not two deep ditches on the side towards the mountains, which no ladder of the League can scale, and walls twelve feet thick, with high towers, whence the falconets keep up no insignificant fire, I can tell you?"
"Battered down, battered down!" cried the thin man, with such a fearful hollow voice, as made the astonished burghers think they heard the falling of the towers of Tübingen about their ears: "the new tower, which Ulerich lately built, was battered down by Fronsberg, as if it had never stood there."
"But everything is not lost with that," answered the pedlar; "the knights make sallies from the castle, and many a one has found his bed in the Neckar. Old Fronsberg had his hat shot from his head, which makes his ears tingle to this day, I'll be bound."
"There you are wrong again," said the thin man, carelessly; "sallies, indeed! the besiegers have light cavalry enough, who fight like devils; they are Greeks; but whether they come from the Ganges or Epirus, I know not, and are called Stratiots, commanded by George Samares, who does not allow a dog of them to sally out of their holes."[1]
"He also has been made to bite the grass," replied the pedlar, with a scornful side glance: "the dogs, as you call them, did make a sally, in spite of the Greeks, and made their leader prisoner, and----"
"Samares prisoner?" cried the rawbone man, startled out of his tranquillity; "you are not right again, friend!"
"No?" answered the other, quietly; "I heard the bells toll, as he was buried in the church of Saint George."
The burghers looked attentively at the thin stranger, to notice the impression this news would make on him. His thick eyebrows fell so low that his eyes were scarcely visible; he twisted his long thin mustachios, and striking the table with his bony hand, said: "And if they have cut him and his Greeks into a hundred pieces, the besieged can't help themselves! the castle must fall; and when Tübingen is ours, good night to Würtemburg! Ulerich is out of the country, and my noble friends and benefactors will be the masters."
"How do you know that he will not come back again? and then----" said the cautious fat man, and clapped on the cover of his goblet.