A TRAVELLERS TALE.*
He that supper for is dight,
He lyes full cold, I trow, this night!
Yestreen to chamber I him led,
This night Gray-steel has made his bed!
SIR EGER, SIR GRAHAME, and SIR GRAY-STEEL.
ON the summit of one of the heights of the Odenwald, a wild and romantic tract of Upper Germany that lies not far from the ?uence of the Main and the Rhihere stood many, many years sihe castle of the Baron Von Landshort. It is now quite fallen to decay, and almost buried among beech trees and dark ?rs; above which, however, its old watch-tower may still be seen struggling, like the former possessor I have mentioo carry a high head and look down upon the neighb try.
The baron was a dry branch of the great family of Katzenellenbogen,+ and ied the relics of the property and all the pride, of his aors. Though the warlike disposition of his predecessors had much impaired the family possessions, yet the baron still endeavored to keep up some show of former state.
The times were peaceable, and the German nobles in general had abaheir inve old castles, perched like eagles s among the mountains, and had built more ve residences in the valleys; still, the baron remained proudly drawn up in his little fortress, cherishing with hereditary ieracy all the old family feuds, so that he was on ill terms with some of his neighbors, on at of disputes that had happened between their great-great-grandfathers.
* The erudite reader, well versed in good-for-nothing lore, will perceive that the above Tale must have been suggested to the old Swiss by a little Frenecdote, a circumstance said to have taken pla Paris.
+ I.e., CATS ELBOW--the name of a family of those parts, and very powerful in former times. The appellation, we are told, was given in pliment to a peerless dame of the family, celebrated for a ?ne arm.
The baron had but one child, a daughter, but Nature, when she grants but one child, always pensates by making it a prodigy; and so it was with the daughter of the baron. All the nurses, gossips, and try cousins assured her father that she had not her equal for beauty in all Germany; and who should know better than they? She had, moreover, been brought up with great care uhe superintendence of two maiden aunts, who had spent some years of their early life at one of the little German courts, and were skilled in all branches of knowledge necessary to the education of a ?ne lady. Uheir instrus she became a miracle of aplishments. By the time she was eighteen she could embroider to admiration, and had worked whole histories of the saints in tapestry with such strength of expression in their tehat they looked like so many souls in purgatory.
She could read without great dif?culty, and had spelled her way through several Church legends and almost all the chivalriders of the Heldenbuch. She had even made siderable pro? writing; could sign her own hout missing a letter, and so legibly that her aunts could read it without spectacles. She excelled in making little elegant good-for-nothing, lady-like kniacks of all kinds, was versed in the most abstruse dang of the day, played a number of airs on the harp and guitar, and knew all the tender ballads of the Minnelieders by heart.
Her aunts, too, having bee ?irts and coquettes in their younger days, were admirably calculated to be vigilant guardians and strict sors of the duct of their niece; for there is no duenna sidly prudent and inex