liged to go to bed, and a terrible
night was followed by an equally bad morning.

When Appenzelder returned from the audience at the Golden Cross, he
found his two best singers in so pitiable a condition that he was
obliged to summon the Emperor's leech, Dr. Mathys, to the sufferers.

The famous physician was really under obligations to remain near the
sovereign at this time of day. Yet he had gone at once to the Stag, and
pronounced the patients there to be the victims of severe poisoning.

A Ratisbon colleague, whom he found with the sufferers, was to
superintend the treatment which he prescribed.

He had left the house a short time before. Master Appenzelder, Wolf
heard from the choir boys, was now with the invalids, and the knight set
off to inquire about them at once.

He had forbidden the idle young singers who wanted to go with him to
follow, but one had secretly slipped after, and, in one of the dark
corridors of the big house, full of nooks and corners, he suddenly heard
a voice call his name. Ere he was aware of it, little Hannibal Melas,
a young Maltese in the boy choir, whose silent, reserved nature had
obtained for him from the others the nickname Tartaruga, the tortoise,
seized his right hand in both his own.

It was done with evident excitement, and his voice sounded eagerly
urgent as he exclaimed:

"I fix my last hope on you, Sir Knight, for you see there is scarcely
one of the others who would not have an intercessor. But I! Who would
trouble himself about me? Yet, if you would only put in a good word, my
time would surely come now."

"Your time?" asked Wolf in astonishment; but the little fellow eagerly
continued:

"Yes, indeed! What Johann of Cologne or at least what Benevenuto can do,
I can trust myself to do too. The master need only try it with me, and,
now that both are ill, put me in place of one or the other."

Wolf, who knew what each individual chorister could do, shook his head,
and began to tell the boy from Malta for what good reason the master
preferred the two sick youths; but little Hannibal interrupted by
exclaiming, in tones of passionate lamentation:

"So you are the same? The master having begun it, all misjudge and crush
me! Instead of giving me an opportunity to show what I can do in a solo
part, I am forced back into the crowd. My best work disappears in the
chorus. And yet, Sir Wolf, in spite of all, I heard the master's own
lips say in Brussels--I wasn't listening--